Kind of like ten minutes with Tony only different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My parents are the only cult members I know.

I'm hungry.

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should say more.

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

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

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

I know a lot of big words.

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

I guess that's not such a bad thing.

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

I could have even taught you how to knit.

Some days I just feel sad.

Irritants

Bra shopping always brings back irritating memories.

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

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

This did not bode well for either of us.

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

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

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

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

Other things that irritate me today:

small dogs

women who call their husbands "hubby"

people who stand on escalators

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

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

fabric softener

Lucky number 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We are the genitals of technology."

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

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

or my personal favourite:

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

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

I am a geek.

Riki would have something to say about all this

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

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

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

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

It all works itself out.

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

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

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

Three papercuts

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

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

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

Shit.

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

It's census week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yarns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know you want it

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