Life is kind of boring, actually. I'm out of vegetables so I went for a walk down to the greengrocer only to find that it had closed an hour and a half before I got there. Who closes a grocery store at 6:00? Honestly.
I walked home and got ogled by the soccer players on my way. Why does everyone have to stare at me all of a sudden? It's weird.
My lamp and I were bored so we had a luau. Look at us dance. We're dancing so much I can't focus my camera.
There is a man in a suit outside Christ Church Cathedral picking the carpet roses to put in his lapel. He makes a bit of a scene of smelling them, then with a look to ensure that no one's watching, he picks one, and finding it unsatisfactory, lets it drop into the grass and picks another. Then, tastefully adorned, he walks away, content in the knowledge that not a single soul saw him do it.
Except for me, but I'm no one, really.
And, I suppose that if I was an omniscient narrator and this a book I'd follow him as he walked, telling you the exact quality of the sound of his footsteps across the pavement, give you snapshots of the streets he walked down, the people he passed. I'd ride the elevator up with him, tell you his name and who exactly he's trying to impress, but I have to go to work.
Though, if I have to add some commentary in with this I'd say that picking flowers from someone else's garden isn't exactly all that cool, even if it is a church garden.
Tomorrow I will take pictures and they will be awesome.
Good night.
"Did you open it?"
"No, I just turned it off and opened the window."
"Good. One time I overcooked a chicken in the oven and when I opened the door it burst into flames. I had to use the fire extinguisher to get it out and then your mother wouldn't eat it."
"It had white crap all over it. Your father just scraped it off and ate it anyways but I couldn't. What the hell's in that stuff anyways?"
"You're so picky. It tasted fine. I think it gave me gas though."
Dad's fire extinguisher chicken should not be confused with his rubber spatula tuna casserole, blue spotted french toast, everything in the fridge stir-fry, or the carrot-apple-onion-cabbage smoothies.
To be fair, he makes really good pancakes and pizza-sized heart-shaped chocolate chip cookies. They are the reason mom married him. The rest of his cooking is a bit of an acquired taste.
Long story short, she kind of fell out on her head. The caption went something like "There's got to be a better way to break up with your girlfriend."
I don't know, really. I guess these people just don't know any better. I mean, Uncle Vic shot his first wife out of the end of a donkey boiler with a half-stick of dynamite. Their relationship ended shortly afterward.
Uncle Vic got bored of his second wife too. He took the ignition crank out of an old wind-up car and attached it to the kitchen stove. The next time his wife went to cook something, he turned the crank and electrocuted her. She wasn't impressed either. Divorce number two.
But then he met an American woman from old money in the south and he started dressing nicely and acting like a civilized human being. Acting like a civilized human being means not having to do with any of the rest of us.
Being the oldest child, I was supposed to be named Victoria, but my parents have this superstitious notion that children can inherit certain personality traits from the names they are given.
All this proves is that my left brain is perpetually unamused.
I shouldn't be surprised though. Pretty much all of me is lopsided in one way or other. My right thumb is noticeably wider than my left. My left leg is a full inch shorter than my right, and no one noticed it until I started complaing that my mom did a crappy job hemming my pants because one pantleg was always longer than the other, even though she made them the same length. And until that point, I was always at a loss as to why it always felt like my right leg was doing all the work while I was rowing, and while one leg was noticeably more flexible than the other.
My boobs are a tad lopsided too, but then again, who's aren't? Unless they're fake, of course. A little bit of imperfection can be kind of endearing. I guess I'm thinking of Robert Brownjohn here. "Obsession and Fantasy" wouldn't have had quite the same effect had he used a supermodel for the photo. Though, it's nowhere near my favourite poster.
I'm not sure what motivated me to write a post about being all lopsided. I'm going to go for a run down to the library and see if I can pick up an interesting book with lots of pictures. Art, design, photography or the like.
This is already feeling like a two-post day.
I'm working on a different floor than I was last year, the only floor in the building which the women's washroom isn't right beside the stairwell. Instead, where the women's washroom should be, were I on any other floor, there is a men's washroom, where I accidentally end up quite regularly because I'm on autopilot.
As far as I know, the women's washroom on my floor is the only one that has a full-body mirror. I've been known on occasion to walk right up to the life-sized me on the wall and think that damn, I'm short. I'm so used to having everyone out there be taller than me that I only really notice I'm short when I'm faced with someone the same height as me. Odd, I know.
I took a moment today to watch a plastic bag float through the air, playing in the updraughts in the atmosphere about a hundred metres above the ground, until eventually it concluded its ascent and began to drop with the same grace with which it rose. Eventually everything succumbs to gravity. It's only a matter of time.
Wow, that's kind of morbid. Wasn't really meant to be. I'm going to bed now.
I got home today, turned on my computer and then promptly fell asleep in front of it. I try not to do that, because it only means I'm going to have a much harder time sleeping at night, but it's hard to reason with yourself when you're already out.
I feel guilty for not posting yesterday, but I was up until midnightish dealing with some things that I'm really not at liberty to discuss on this blog and at that point sleeping so that I can stay awake at work is a much higher priority than blogging. One day I'll get paid to blog and then you'll own me. My every post will be your command.
Last night I ended up at Metrotown with a friend trying to find something to wear for a wedding that I feel obligated to go to even though I don't particularly want to. The problem is that absolutely nothing fits right. I have a really short torso so everything I try on bunches up in the back, just above my butt. The one store there that was dedicated completely to petite-sized people like me had a selection that was completely unappealing.
The list of things that I don't do is so immense as to be beyond human comprehension:
pink
white
brown
yellow
super sheer fabric
ruffles
smocking
sequins
sparkles
things above knee-length
frills and pleats, unless they're the kind that is meant to obscure the fact that you have a lumpy stomach
And of course, the only things I could find that were the least bit interesting were black, and my companion wouldn't even let me try them on because apparently there's this rule out there that I've never heard of before that you can't wear black to weddings. Apparently wearing black automatically makes it a funeral. But at least if I get something black I can wear it again.
I really need to get my own personal tailor. The fashion industry is really letting me down.
And then in the middle of all this, a person we knew in high school called multiple times trying to get us to come out to a party. As time wore on he became progressively more pushy in that over the top happy friendly sort of way that you only use when you're really irritated that you're not getting your way.
Let's just say I don't like being argued with about things like this. No amount of arguing will get me to change my mind once it's made up, and if people can't accept "sorry, I can't come. I have other plans" and leave it at that, then they can go fuck themselves.
And let us also say that if you can't accept the fact that I'm unwilling to go an all-night party in the middle of the work week in Kitsilano, easily an hour and a half home on the bus at night, to drink with a bunch of people, none of which I've previously met then you're insane. I'm just not doing it and you won't win me over by trying to make me. I refuse to show up at work hungover and without having had a reasonable amount of sleep. Sorry that I have to act like such a responsible adult all the time.
2:00 found me waking up in my chair at work and then stumbling downstairs in search of coffee. In the kitchen at work there's instant or preground or whatever the hell kind of stuff comes out of cans. You know the stuff that might smell vaguely like coffee but isn't really? I can't drink that stuff.
My parents were the first people we knew who ground their own coffee beans and that's what I was raised on. I made the mistake at the coffee shop of not specifying that I wanted dark blend coffee and ended up with the default medium, which is terrible, like water, only off.
I like my coffee tall, dark and handsome.
I've been craving cabbage rolls a lot lately, but alas, I am out and I'm not going to have another until at least September. You can buy them at the store, but storebought is not nearly as good as homemade. I remember one time we had Christmas dinner at my grandma's and by coincidence both my mom and my aunt's mother-in-law brought casserole dishes full of them. Mom's cabbage rolls are melt-in-your-mouth good and the other lady's tasted like beef and rice rolled in cabbage with Campbell's tomato soup poured on them. They're just not the same.
The recipe came all the way from Ukraine, which is why it's so good. It's written out in Katarina Gutjahr's own hand and is titled "grandma Katie's baked beans." It sits beside the other treasured, hundred-year old recipes like mom's secret microwave Christmas candy, passed down from generation to generation.
What? You don't believe that German Russians had microwaves in the old country? It's true, I tell you.
"What is it?" I walked up to the door, my keys out, ready to unlock it. I stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed a giant black slug sliming its way up the door. On the inside of the door frame was a second. Both were at least four inches long.
I squealed, and then without speaking, dad and I both plunged our keys into our pockets. "Carla! We're locked out. Can you come and unlock the door for us?" dad asked.
She took her sweet time getting to the door, during which we had a hard time suppressing our giggles. When she finally reached us, keys in hand, she screamed.
And then no one wanted to open the door because the doorknob might possibly be slimed.
Finally I did it, because I'm brave.
I'm positively fearless, I tell you.
We still don't know why they were there in the first place. I think they were trying to eat the house and us alive.
