My second 11 years

1997 - I secretly decide that I'm going to become a poet for a living. I write out all my poems in my best handwriting and stick them in a special duotang in case I just happened to run into a literary agent on the playground. (This one is grabbed from my previous post because evidently I'm an idiot that can't count to 11)

1998 - I take exception to the lack of challenging work and patronizing tone used by the staff at middle school and passive aggressively fail everything for both this and next year.

1999 - We rescue a pathetic little bunny who had been abandoned in the park. He was a whirlwind; he arrived, was universally loved, dominated our lives and died all within a few months.

2000 - I get a scholarship for community service that I still haven't spent.

2001 - I am the only one at an information session about something I thought was the school dragonboating team. It wasn't. It was rowing instead, which it turns out was infinitely cooler than dragonboating.

2002 - I have a weird schedule that ensures I have lot of time off when no one in the known world is around. I spend the time sitting by myself in the library, teaching myself useless phrases in German.

2003 - I drop a 400 lb boat on myself. It results in a back injury that still hasn't healed.

2004 - Italy trip, woohoo! Moving to the shithole of the universe! Not woohoo!

2005 - I manage to flip an "unflippable" kayak into the grossness of Burnaby Lake. I shower with a crusty old piece of soap I find in the washroom, use ... um... someone's towel and brush out my hair with a fork because I'm classy like that.

2006 - I daydream the entire year away. Where it went, I don't know.

2007 - In the winter I celebrate having an apartment to myself by doing everything buck naked. I grow out of it once it gets warm enough that I have to keep all the windows open all the time. My desk chair is vinyl.

2008 - This year is apparently not over yet.

Missed the first 11 years of my life? I didn't! You can read my summary here.

73/365: Megan

Megan was my best friend in kindergarten, before she moved away. About four years after that, her family started having annual get-togethers in the park and she would wander over and knock on my door to ask if I was there. Every time she did this, she wouldn't recognize me at first, but once we'd introduced ourselves, we'd sit down on my front porch and talk like we saw each other every day.

Then the house was demolished almost five years ago. I didn't see her again until my grad dinner/dance, because her school's grad just happened to be at Canada Place at the same time.

Not once in all of this did we ever think to exchange phone numbers or email addresses. I've often wondered where she is now.

72/365: Johnny IV

John was my rowing coach. He had a pink Ford F150 which may or may not have faded that way from red, damn it, and had a habit of wearing cologne with hints of lavender. We used to buy him hair barettes and raisin bran with extra raisins from the bulk section as gifts.

He was notorious for mooching food so one day I brought a big bag of wasabi peas to a regatta with me. Without asking, he grabbed a handful of them and popped them in his mouth. The look on his face was priceless.

No horses

"Oh my god, Ebj, did you listen to my phone message? When you hang up wait three days until you forget I called and then listen to it. It's so dumb you will wonder why we're even friends!" This is Mimi's roundabout way of declaring that she really wants to come upstairs to my apartment to crash on my couch.

If this was sometime last week I would say something to the effect of "damn straight you can hang in my apartment of awesomeness!" but it's this week and that's not my apartment anymore.

When she found out where I'm living now she invited me to go for $2 burgers with some equestrian types. She's not an equestrian type and neither am I. Apparently the new boyfriend is and she needed an ally in a room full of horse people.

It's not that I don't like horses. They're fine. It's just that they're big, unpredictable and kind of excitable. I don't feel comfortable around them and I think they know that. Given the choice between horseback riding and doing pretty much anything else, I'd just as soon not go anywhere near the horses.

But turns out that I didn't go anywhere near the horse people either because she didn't actually know where this thing was happening. "Rain check?" was the response I got. Oh well, another time.

Just as well, because I had a feeling like certain people I know would likely be or not be there, and I may or may not want to see them. Pretty vague, eh?

I spent the rest of the evening watching So You Think You Can Dance with my sister and doing a thorough investigation of the music she's been listening to lately. She thinks you should listen to Luke Doucet:

71/365: Glyn

My first reaction upon seeing him was to wonder whether he'd been photoshopped to look like that, but no, he just looks like a hot lifeguard from a crappy B movie naturally. He's articulate, charismatic and awesome to the power of eighteen. I admire the way that he can throw himself wholeheartedly at good causes.

If you've got nothing nice to say...

I've sat here for three hours now and come to the conclusion that everything I could possibly write about today falls into two main categories.

The first is things that are so banal that they just wouldn't be all that interesting to tell. I realize that some people have said in the past that I do a good job of making the banal details of my boring life interesting with my telling of them but I don't feel like I have the patience to do that today. I feel like a lot of those are things I've already flogged to death here anyways.

The other category is an ever-growing body of stuff that I can't put up here. This isn't the place for it because it's work-related or directly related to my move (which is a really long story, wasn't on good terms and complaints about which are best settled with the people whom they're about and/or the proper authorities).

I don't think I've mentioned anything about my aunt's ugly divorce of epic proportions that is getting nastier and more abusive by the day because not only would she not appreciate it if she found out that I'd posted details on the internet, none of you (all two of you) would know who I'm talking about or any of the background for it anyways.

There are other things that I feel are just a little too current, a little too close, a little too personal or a little too hot to touch right now.

Of course, I could always find something to complain about because there are enough shitty things in the world to criticize, but I feel like I've done enough of that too. It's too easy.

I talk too much anyways. If you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all.

Things I learn from Facebook

Facebook creeping is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. I love being able to look up people I haven't seen for a while and see how they're doing or what they're up to, and I'd suspect that a lot of other people do the same.

I learn a lot that way, though I don't always want to admit it. Sometimes I'll ask people questions I already know the answers to just to make conversation and becasue I think there's a bit of a stigma associated with creeping around on facebook, even if people make the info available for you to see.

Maybe it's that when you call or meet someone and ask them a question they know you're inquiring about them, but when you fill out your profile on facebook, any number of nameless, faceless persons could view it, and they don't have to bother telling you that they did.

But I learn things from all of this, which I like. I've always found it interesting to see that two completely unrelated people who each know me can have other mutual friends without knowing each other. As someone who sits on the outer edge of a lot of very different social circles, I think it's fascinating to see how they relate to each other.

It's what I learn about myself that is the most interesting, though. Something that facebook has revealed to me recently is that my gaydar is sexist. I'm usually pretty good at identifying or at least suspecting beyond a reasonable doubt when guys are gay, even if they aren't overtly so.

But women? Unless they say they are, I just can't tell. This is something I just would not have known without facebook.

Is this revelation the least bit important? Does it change anything about anything? Probably not.

71/365: R.

The local narc. He put his stick-thin Japanese wife on the Atkins diet and nearly starved her to death, while telling everyone how absolutely wonderful it was. "Erin, don't you just love to eat a nice juicy steak?" he said.

"Not really."

"What about pork chops? I bet you love pork chops."

"Not really."

"What do you eat then?"

"Carbs."

Hello, Maple Ridge

I handed over my keys today.

That means that tonight I'm sitting in my parents' basement listening to the sound of the tenant with Noisy American Boyfriend Number Two. I swear he has no volume control on his voice, which is especially apparent around midnightish when he always seems to be talking.

Though, I shouldn't complain all that much because I think he's infinitely better than Noisy American Boyfriend Number One. When you're writing papers and studying for exams, nothing is more distracting than suddenly hearing grunts and the couch upstairs squeaking. Once discovered, it's hard to tune out.

I don't really have any space out here. My bed's been in the living room for a while now. I change my clothes... wherever. I've set up my desk in this armchair. Shower time is at a premium.

One good thing about this lack of space is that it gives me a good reason to be ruthless in the culling of the stuff I own. For years I have clung to everything using every stupid psychological and sentimental reason as justification for continuing to be the packrat that I am. Paradoxically, at the same time that I found myself unable to send things away, I wanted badly to be rid of the clutter. I'd get really pissed off when people bought me tons of random crap for gifts instead of the one thing I wanted, but would be unable to exchange or return it all because it was given to me as a gift.

Now I really have no space for it all. Some things have to go.

I'm a little cautious about being optimistic right now. I walk around on eggshells. I go back to being a turtle, dragging everything around with me, spending as little time as possible at home.

Things could be worse.

My first 11 years

1986 - Must have been a crazy party because I don't remember it at all.

1987 - The dog was afraid of me because every time he licked my face I cried and then he'd get yelled at.

1988 - I go trick-or-treating at the house across the street and it's TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT.

1989 - We hook the toboggan up to the dog and I end up face down in a snowdrift.

1990 - My parents come home with something purple and shrivelled. "It's your sister," they said but it takes a while before I believe them.

1991 - Frustrated that my parents won't buy me a skateboard or a monocle like I want, I take up knitting.

1992 - I do a fantastic Evel Knievel impression, flying over the holes dug for the footings of a bridge and landing underneath my bike in the river below. It hurts.

1993 - We get family computer #3, an AST Bravo with Windows 2.0 and a colour screen. It's "IBM compatible." Oooh!

1994 - I spend an entire year wearing ankle-length crinkle skirts and coloured leotards.

1995 - I design my first website in HTML. It has blinking yellow text and a grey background. Its url contains at least 80 distinct forward slashes.

1996 - Dad brings home a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. "It plays music," he said. "We don't have a CD player," we said. It killed his enthusiasm right away.

69/365: K.R.

I really looked up to her for a while, mostly because we spent so much time in close proximity and she was older than me and used her allowance to buy all sorts of cool popular music. She had a temper that would flare up with a surprisingly small amount of harassment, which happened fairly often in her household. When pushed, her voice would ascend to a high-pitched, hysterical whine that would float above whatever conflict was happening below.

I've only seen her a few times over the past couple years, working a shift at the Zellers, and then the last time on the bus. She must have been going to an interview because she were all dressed up. The hem of her, unlined polyester suit blazer curled outward in the heat.x

Bring it on.

It is tacitly understood that we are all not to eat at Hon's more than twice a week. To add variety to our Chinese food diet, there's another place that we go to where we are also regulars, and have been for some time.

About a year ago the place switched hands and though the staff didn't change, a few other things did. The staff seemed a little less enthusiastic at first, which is sad, and they changed the fortune cookies that they gave out.

The old ones used to be unwrapped. They weren't always super fresh like they are at Hon's, but they were alright. Now though, they hand out prepackaged ones wrapped in celophane that has a surprisingly long ingredient list on the outside with all those bizarre long words we know and love. They taste kind of chemically and I don't really like them.

I found one today that came home with me uneaten. I'm not sure when I got it. I opened it and found this fortune inside. I didn't eat the cookie.

The question though, is should I get all hopeful that good and exciting things are coming my way, or will the Bureau of Fortune Cookie Investigation revoke my good luck on the technicality that I didn't open the cookie after dinner?

If you are in the know, please advise.

68/365: Grandpa Bill

He had planned to outlive grandma because she was frail and had MS. For several years he secretly diverted her pension cheques to his wife in the States, which wasn't so much of a problem because it was kind of like paying for assisted living, only a little less above the table.

In fact, it wasn't until he died that everyone really started to realize how incapable grandma was of living alone.

He was the most reliable source of comic books I had, and in most ways, the most grandfatherly of my grandfathers.

Dregs

Okay, I'm a slow mover. Most of my stuff is gone but there are little things lying all over the place that I still haven't accounted for.

I find that the longer I go the slower things get. Like books. Everything else is in boxes that were at least half filled according to some sort of theme or subject, but not everything fit in those boxes, thematically or otherwise. I'm left with some dregs, not a whole box worth, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with them.

Should I just box all of these things up together? I have a feeling that if I just throw everything in with everything else and label it misc. I won't see it for at least four years.

So I'm sitting here with a handbook of Canadian Parliamentary procedure, the Batman action figure we rescued from the roof, a package of drafting pencils and a lonely glass that didn't fit in with the other glasses.

I'm not getting anything done.

67/365: Grandma Eileen

She is rude, unpleasant, lacking in social grace and racist in a way I find embarassing. She is the sort of person who will buy you a present that you didn't know you didn't need or want (ie. "sounds of September" meditation sound effects CD), wrap it in a garbage bag and give it to you with the price tags still attached. Is this why I like her so much?

Vagabond

I've had this little laptop for almost four years now so every once in a while I run into stuff tucked into little corners that I didn't even know I had. It's always weird because I like to think that I know my computer inside and out, but stranger things have happened.

After months of feeling really bored of my music, I did something really uncharacteristic for me, which was to put everything on shuffle and turn it up really loud. Eventually this played:



Beck + Air = awesomeness

I don't think I've heard it since 2004, when I was still trying unsuccessfully to convince myself that I hated electronic music because it was electronic.

I was also deep into a phase of trying to convince myself I loved indie music because it was indie, sidestepping the fact that some of it is awesome and unsigned or signed to smaller labels because it doesn't want to sell out or just hasn't been discovered yet, but some stuff is indie because it just sucks.

It was a phase not unlike and just as dumb as my "if it's mainstream, it sucks" phase. Yes, it's true that nothing on the radio is worth listening to, but that doesn't mean that being on the radio makes things suck. They're just strongly correlated, that's all.

Anyways, I have this song stuck in my head. It won't leave. I guess listening to it multiple times on repeat doesn't help with that.

It's the sort of thing that I would pick for a tap solo. It would piss Donna off because it's got too much of a groove for her to choreograph over because she lacked the genes for groove. I'd take it to festival and half the adjudicators would think it's cool and nail me on my sloppy technique, and the others would nail me for being unorthodox.

Because let's face it, the only song that you're allowed to tap dance to at festival is Love Shack.

My sister graduated

My sister graduated yesterday.



We plugged the meter with sufficient change.



She sang a solo in the choir and did a really good job of it.



The band was excellent. Mr. Hembruff wore his tails, which pushes his awesomeness off the radar.



These guys make me miss band sooooo much.



As much as I love the Orpheum, it just wasn't made for photo ops. The lighting was terrible so most of mine kind of suck.

2am

When words fail you, draw a picture. I hate how my scanner seems to be allergic to making pencil marks look good. There's a bigger version on the flickr page.

Inspired by Assignment 10: make a flyer of your day.

The Old Mill

I love ruins. There's something really beautiful about them and the way they're slowly reclaimed so since it wasn't rainy today I took my camera out on my run.

I've posted pictures of the Old Mill before but gradually the site changes and the seasons change so it looks a little different every time I go down there. It's one of a few sawmills that used to be in the area. Others have for various reasons not fared quite as well as this one.

There are more people around these days now that it's been officially designated as a park, but even still it tends to be a little empty like all good ruins.

I've always wondered what the original floorplan was. It seems like an odd assortment of different footings and sections of foundation and concrete, of different vintages with some gaping holes where there would have been huge timbers for beams and joists. The bricks aren't much help because none of them are still standing.

I know that this was built to hold log booms and keep them from floating away:



But what about this?

Bubbles!

I fell asleep in a bathtub on the Amalfi Coast. It was nearly full-sized, the first of its kind we'd encountered in all of Italy.

The night before we'd stayed in a hotel room with a bathtub that was two and a half feet square with a faucet that protruded right into the middle, such that you bashed your leg into it no matter how you stood or sat. The shower head was four and a half feet high, too short for even me to really use effectively and the lack of a shower curtain ensured that your towels and clothes were thoroughly soaked by the time you were finished.

The night before that there was a shower curtain around a drain in the floor. The curtain clung to you if you were unfortunate enough to accidentally touch it, and the whole contraption left a rather large puddle in front of the toilet that I managed to step in in the middle of the night.

It was a warm day, though not unpleasant. Much to our dismay, the tour guide had shortened the length of our stops so we'd spent most of our time on the bus listening to the driver's collection of cheesy Neapolitan music. Stopping in the evening was a relief.

The hotel was a labyrinth of stepped floors and stairwells etched into the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. We ran off in search of our rooms. Jess and I had been assigned to what seemed to be the honeymoon suite with our own private balcony, though the smog really did wonders to destroy the view.

What we were really excited about was the fact that we had our own private bathroom, which was more than could be said about some of the others in our party. It was larger than we'd had previously and covered floor to ceiling with azure tiles. Most importantly, it had a normal sized bathtub and a shower that matched up to our stuck-up North American standards. Joy!

After about half an hour sitting in the bar upstairs and having fun reading and massacring the names of every drink on the list, I suddenly decided that I wanted to have a bath. If I remember correctly, I announced this quite loudly with a really childish giggle.

I hadn't had a bath for over ten years because I'm a shower person, but for some reason it was suddenly a huge novelty, especially since the room came with complementary bottles of bubble bath. Bubbles!

I slid down into the water so that the only thing not submerged was my face, letting the water lap at the edges of my scalp. I closed my eyes, only to open them again when Jess banged on the door. "You still alive in there?" she shouted. The water was suddenly cold.

I haven't had a bath since.

Take these hands and throw them in the river

Someone arrived at this blog today looking for pointers on how to pry elevator doors open. I don't know how everyone else does it but I pry them open with my bare hands.

Someone also came looking for twilight zone tupperware. I'm intrigued. Does it eat your soul or cause disaster in an unexpected way? That would definitely add some intrigue to tupperware parties.

This is turning into a really crappy post. Fact is, things aren't going so well and it's really killing my ability to think of something amusing for everyone to read. It's just not where my head is at right now.

Sorry guys.

I have nothing to say today.

Eagerly anticipating stuffing my face

Everything you see here was hand weeded by me today. The neighbours let their lawn go to seed so there was grass everywhere. I also killed a lot of slugs.

If you're curious and you want to know what's planted there, you can look at the notes on the flickr page for the photo. I didn't list all the cultivars because it's late and I'm lazy. There are seven different kinds of beans, more than ten kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of carrots, etc. That's only really a third of it. On the other side of the garage there are grapes, pears, apples, figs, strawberries blueberries, squash and rhubarb.

I think next year it would be cool to tear up the remainder of the lawn in the back yard and plant quinoa and oats and go semi-zero-mile. I think lawns suck anyways.

I'm not really doing this because it's fashionable right now or because I want to save the earth. It's more because I'm a really picky eater and the stuff they import from California looks very nice but tastes like nothing and has less nutritional value than locally grown food because it's picked long before it's ripe. It's not real food. It's hybridized crap that has been bred to produce a uniform product that ships well, and not to taste good or be better for your health.

Not to mention, red tomatoes, orange carrots, red radishes, lettuce-only salads are boring. Wherever possible, food should look really cool because that amuses me.

So screw you, California. I'm going to eat my purple tomatoes and black and white cow spotted beans. I just wish there wasn't so much rhubarb to eat. So. Much. Rhubarb.

Lou helped me weed. She's good at that. The orange fencing is there to keep her from weeding when no one's around.

Found!

I've been cleaning today because on Monday apparently someone is coming over to see my apartment and the object of the game is to make myself not look like the slob I am. Let's just say that at this point, my kitchen is spotless. All I need is to photoshop in some sparkle and I'm set.

I'm finding things all over the place. I found this note today:



I don't know when I wrote it, or why exactly I had to express my hatred for the suckiest of all fonts on the back of a piece of scrap paper but I did.

I also found this missing sock:



I love these socks! They're really heavy wool and I wear them to school in the winter because I get cold in class. But because they're wool and the cats' eyes are beaded I hand wash them, and when it comes to hand washing my clothes I get really lazy.

Somewhere in the wait to be washed, one of the socks walked off and I hadn't seen it in two years. Now it still needs to be washed.

Photocopying skillz, yo

I have some cousins in Ontario that I've never ever met before. They're the children of my uncle Lloyd who for many years didn't have much to do with any of us because he was a fancy, cultured university professor and we just sucked. He'd come to visit my grandmother and conveniently forget to tell anyone else that he was here.

Now that he's retired though, and now that my grandparents are dead, he's had a bit of a change of heart. We're seeing him a lot more often than we ever did before, and for the first time ever, cousins I've never met are contacting us. To be fair, they're asking for donations for MS or cancer research or whatever, but still, all this interaction with family is kind of new.

They want pictures because they don't know what we all look like so I've been digging around my external hard drive looking for things. While doing that I've been running into all sorts of old photos and that's been reminding me of old posts that I had forgotten were even on this blog.

Posts like this one where I became so frustrated by my joblessness that I considered throwing out my resume and replacing it with a photoessay instead.

I think the original still stands, though I would add the above picture with the caption: carrying water jug skillz.

Oh, and also I sit on the board of directors for an international film festival and I've held three executive positions in my student union, including president. I've written grant proposals for nonprofit organizations, worked as a research assistant for my profs, edited a magazine, know lots of computer programs and I don't smell bad. Clearly that makes me unemployable.

Actually, no, the fact that I don't apply for cashier or waitress jobs makes me unemployable.

I guess that's stupid because if you wanted me to do your photocopying all day I'd totally do that. I got mad photocopying skillz.

Pantyhose is dead to me.

Dear pantyhose,

That stunt you pulled today? Not cool.

Alright, I get it. You don't like my butt. You like to slide your way off it and bunch up right around my hips and annoy the shit out of me.

I knew you sucked before I put you on but all my pants are in the wash and my mom thinks that women who wear skirts without stockings to job interviews are crude and unemployable. Besides it was cold out.

But we're a team, remember? We don't have to like each other; we just need to work together.

That means not inching your way down my thighs while I walk, because try as I might, there is no dignified and discrete way to hike up your hose in public, and there just aren't enough public washrooms around to duck into.

It also means not peer-pressuring my underwear to follow suit. It doesn't know any better. Why'd you have to drag it down to your level?

No, you let me walk in to a strange office and get ushered into an interview before I could ask to use their washroom, and unbeknownst to them you let me sit bare assed through the entire thing.

You're so annoying I want to cut you into little pieces with scissors.

Every time I look summer gets suckier

My summer is quickly declining into the biggest suckiest suckdom that ever sucked.

In April I wasn't all that interested in doing anything. I'd gone five straight semesters at school - fall, spring, summer, fall, spring, worked the summer and all my holidays. I took an entire month off to vegetate and regain my sanity, which felt good.

May came with the realization that my dream of going back to my cushy well-paying government job had fallen through because of some changed HR practices, though in retrospect I kind of knew that was coming.

That in itself wasn't a horrible shock at the time because I was busy with some design work. Among other things, I laid out this magazine and I've gotten lots of kudos on it so far.

I thought about my joblessness for a while and thought that because it will be impossible to (legally and ethically and non-prostitutionally) get a summer job that pays as well as my former cushy government job of awesomeness, that it was time for me to find a job that was interesting or fulfilling or career-furthering in some way.

The former job was none of those. The people I worked with were excellent and I was treated very well. The hours I worked were flexible. It was an easy commute. It was the work that I was doing that hollowed out my brain and ate my soul.

So I go about applying for a bunch of jobs that just look cool. I get a bunch of interviews for said cool looking jobs.

At about the same time I get summoned for jury duty. I don't know at this point exactly when or how long this trial will be or if I'll actually be required to sit through it. This means that because I'm responsible and wonderful, when people ask in interviews about my availability to work I mention it.

Let me tell you that saying something to the effect of "I may or may not be available for two or more weeks during the course of this ten to twelve week long contract but I don't know which weeks" is really a turn-off to potential employers. Who knew?

Now, I know that legally they are not allowed to discriminate against me because of this, but there's no way to really prove discrimination unless I get fired from a job I already had. All I can do is suspect it and feel screwed over.

So I remain gainfully unemployed. Fucking goddamn.

Memerific mosaic

My carpal tunnel is really acting up so I don't want to type. So instead, have a look at my mosaic!



The concept:
1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
2. Using only the first page of results, and pick one image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab's Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

The questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food? right now?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favourite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favourite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. What is one word that describes you?
12. What is your flickr name?

via Schmutzie

The Cannery

My dad's birthday was a couple of days ago and we ended up at the Cannery, which has a nice view of the Port of Vancouver and Burrard Inlet.

Getting there is kind of a pain because it's physically inside the port and you have to go through a security checkpoint to get in. That means that your dad will ignore two sets of signage that states that visitors should use the left lane and drive right into the one that is marked "semi trucks only."

You will tell him that you're in the wrong lane and he will state that everyone is on camera as he backs up to drive into the right lane. You'll sit there with nothing happening until someone will mention that you have to buzz in. The button though is way too far away for you to reach out your window to press, because you're all sitting the farthest away from it you can possibly be while still being in the lane. Back up and try again.

After this ordeal, you can finally settle down with some wine and bread dipped in lobster infused oil.

Mom likes to tell about how she first went there in 1977 when it was right across the railway tracks from where she worked in an industrial marine supply company. Asian women with poor English used to come in to their shop front, reeking of fish to buy rubber gloves, but they only ever wanted to buy left gloves and not the pair.

Back then they used to have the most awesome silk pie, which always seems to come up with the telling of the story about the cannery women. Silk pie isn't on the menu anymore, and even though we have the official recipe for it at home, it always seems to come up.

Of course, Abby has to pull out the toy voyagers again. They want to see the sunset too.

Fork it

I had a dream last night that I broke the tines off of forks one by one, bending the metal until it became brittle and snapped.

I did this with a lot of precision and care because it had to be done just right. I'd use the resulting utensils to eat kiwis.

Every day I went through the same process of breaking my forks before using them until I noticed a decline in the number of forks in the drawer. It worried me so I brought it up with my mom. It was then that I learned that she had been finding my broken forks and throwing them out.

"Mom, you're being counterproductive here," I said. She rolled up a newspaper and whacked me with it.

I need to sleep

It creeps up on me every once in a while. It starts in the pit of my stomach with a knot that rises, stringing my heart along with it, fluttering and palpitating until it comes to rest at the back of my throat. I choke on it as it sits there lodged.

I can't think straight. Things fly off in all directions. I don't think rationally, and when I do it's upstaged by the tickertape panic running all over everything.

I avoid people because I become worried that I'll do something stupid, yet alone I will feel claustrophobic and caged. The walls close in. My heart races. I wander around with a butcher knife. I curse myself for being so dumb.

I close my eyes, take deep breaths but that only seems to make it worse. My heart's still fluttering in my throat.

I want some valium but I don't have any. I settle for a tall glass of something hard, drank straight to calm my nerves. Today it works. It doesn't always.

I don't do this often, honest. I shouldn't even be posting this, but fuck it, I'm drunk. I wasn't lying when I said I self medicate.

Tomorrow morning I'll be fine.