Roll out your stars

I stepped off the bus and into the frost, waited to cross the street to go home. The moon looked odd a couple nights ago. I'm not sure how it looked because I was indoors and downtown but my dad left a message on my phone about how I should go take a look, that it was something he'd never seen before.

The sign on the telephone pole at the intersection told me that I missed something important that night. UFOs or something, and a connect-the-dots coded message. I should repent my sins.

But instead I started singing this song:



The words came out in a dense fog, so I sang louder, to see if I could make the cloud bigger. Normally singing in public would get me stared at, but there's noone out tonight, not even the swallows.

I won't lie. I really haven't been having a good month and I've got a lot to feel crappy about right now. I don't want to be so wide awake.

Defying all expectations

This week I've felt absolutely swamped. I've got too many things going on.

One of those things is a group project where we're supposed to be making policy recommendations to the school for reducing the amount of waste trucked to landfills. In addition to the policy report we have to prepare a presentation and I was looking for pictures I could borrow from flickr, using the flickr tags search in the top corner of firefox.

My part of the presentation is on the public relations strategy for the Toronto Green Bin Program and other similar campaigns to get people to compost.

I typed 'city of toronto' in the search box in firefox, but forgot to change the search from flickr tags to google. I got the following four photos as a result:









I am so confused.

I'm going to go to bed.

Revisions?

I'm not sure I understand this writing intensive course thing. I mean, I understand the point. I'm supposed to get better at writing through writing lots and getting feedback.

But what I don't get is when I write a draft for a paper, tear out my hair in frustration writing it, resign myself to it being the crappiest piece of shit I've ever written and hand it in in shame only to have it returned to me with nary a mark but an A.

What am I supposed to do with that? How does this help me? I refuse to believe that there is nothing that could have been improved. Something can always be improved.

I realize that I tend to hold myself to different standards than others but it is by no means the best paper I've ever written. I don't really see how these writing intensive classes help me if that's the best feedback they can give me.

All they're really saying is that I'm perfect and it's all downhill from here, which is crap. I need challenge.

Feist

You know the problem with having your favourite music go mainstream is suddenly it's everywhere like ipod commercials and Saturday Night Live and then suddenly it rushes to the top of the charts and then suddenly no one believes you when you say something like "oh yeah, Feist, I've loved her for years."

Oh, but I have. I first discovered her through these guys:



They're called Kings of Convenience and they're from Norway. Bergen, to be exact, which seems like an entirely charming and liveable place for the following two reasons:

1) It is near the ocean.
2) It has a museum dedicated entirely to leprosy.

Surely this is a place I could see myself living in.

But that's beside the point, because this is a post about Feist. I first heard her voice through this song in 2004 around the time when France pretty much kept her to itself:



Which she sings all by herself on French TV (a version I like better):



But no one believes me when I say this. And when I ask people to go with me to see bands they've never heard no one will.

Lou

Further to what I said earlier about telling you about some of my favourite photos, this is Lou.

It is also the very first picture I ever took with my Canon Digital Rebel XT that I had bought with my SFU entrance scholarship earlier that day on July 3, 2005.

If Lou was human, she'd likely be considered to be highly functioning mentally challenged or developmentally delayed. Physically she's an adult, but mentally she's stuck at kitten, which for a cat really isn't much of a problem.

She has epilepsy and a slight habit of hanging herself in the venetian blinds. She has an immense vocabulary of squeaks and squawks. Sometimes she sits outside on the kitchen windowsill and watches us eat dinner as if it were TV, and as you can see from this picture, she likes sticking her nose in your face. We're really glad we refused to let the vet put her down so many years ago.

Things I learned from TV, part 2

Ie. my literal reading of primetime commercials.

Kia vehicles cure emo.

Tim Hortons coffee, when supplemented with hockey, either watched or played, mends family rifts and puts to rest old feuds.

Westjet staff love you. They must use Nicorette because that's what makes airline stewardesses pleasant.

Eating cheese keeps you barefoot and pregnant.

Purolator helps auctioneers ship things because they talk too funny to help themselves.

Booking trips on Expedia.ca makes you speak far too quickly to be able to communicate effectively.

Volvo really, really, really badly wants to break into the Canadian market.

Listening to Sigur Ros in your car is the leading cause of pedestrian deaths in Canada.

Everything I do, nothing seems to turn out right.

I scared another one away today. We were at a dialogue downtown about Afghanistan and Canada's foreign policy, he singled me out, seemed friendly and nice and then I scared him away somehow. I don't know how I do it. I open my mouth, I guess. I should just shut up.

I do the same with job interviews and trying to make new friends. I open my mouth and then it's all downhill from there.

I suck at life.

Must recapture muse.

How do you explain this? My nail clippers were on my desk beside me and now they are not. I heard them drop off the edge on Monday and went looking for them a few hours later. I didn't find them, but I didn't worry either. I figured they'd show up when I cleaned up.

But now I've cleaned my desk, the floor surrounding it and the bookshelf beside it and there are no nail clippers to be found.

Now my fingernails are getting dangerously long, as in they're starting to look like normal person fingernails and this is beginning to irritate me. I'm going to buy a new set of clippers tomorrow, even though I know that that way I'll find the old pair right away. I just can't win.

School ends in a week. I've promised myself that I'll go forth and take interesting pictures like I used to. Like in 2005:

I think I'm going to mine through all my old photos on flickr and tell everyone about them. They've already been on this blog, but rarely if ever do the photos on here match the posts. Not to mention, for most of its history, not a lot of people have read this blog anyways.

Bucket loss, and other trials

All my compost buckets were full, so my parents came to take them all away, and somehow forgot to bring them back. That means I've been without a sealable compost bucket since Friday and I'm not quite sure what to do.

I called them on Monday, but nothing's changed yet. I'm kind of at their mercy because I sincerely doubt my ability to purchase and eat an entire four litre bucket of ice cream in one sitting. Besides, I don't really eat that stuff anymore, and I don't have the room for it anyways. Right now my freezer is filled with peas.

And pumpkin. I have a lot of pumpkin in my freezer right now, which is partially my problem. I cut a large pumpkin up on Friday and baked it so I could freeze it for muffins and soup and such. Consequently I have an entire pumpkin's worth of guts sitting out on my kitchen counter and nowhere to put it.

I was faced with a dilemma. I could stick it in an airtight plastic container and run the risk of the plastic absorbing the smell, or I could stick it into a ceramic bowl and cover the top with plastic, which is what I did. The upside is that I will definitely be able to clean the bowl and use it again, but the downside is that for whatever reason, the plastic wrap doesn't seem to be 100% airtight. I wouldn't go so far as to say that my apartment smells particularly bad, but it is noticeable when you enter the kitchen, and I can see it getting worse if I don't get a bucket soon.

Putting it out on my balcony is out of the question because the crows will get at it. I guess I could flush it down the toilet. I don't know. Sticking it in the garbage is out of the question. Compost goes in the compost.

Some days I really don't feel like I'm particularly in control of anything and this is one of those days. I wish my city had a curbside compost program like all civilized cities so that I wouldn't have to rely on my parents, because they're bad at remembering this stuff.

And, for the record, since January 1st, 2007, I have taken five half-bags of garbage out to the dumpster. I will most likely finish one more before the end of the year. That's it. I challenge everyone to do the same because it's really not hard.

Damn you, November

November's never been a good month for blogging for me.

November is when all the papers are due.

November is when my social life implodes.

November has no holidays except for Rememberance Day, and that one doesn't count because it's not something fun that you can look forward to.

November is when it gets cold again.

November is when they switch the time zones on you and all of a sudden it's dark at 3:30 and you are in very real danger of being hit and killed in an intersection multiple times per day.

November is when the inedibles in my fridge begin to outnumber the edibles.

November is a month when no matter how hard I stare at my bank statement, the numbers just keep going down.

It's when I run out of decent pictures and lack the time to go shoot more.