5000 Spells

So for Christmas mom got a book called 5000 Spells, and the idea was that she would sneak it onto the shelf in her office between all her personnell files and wait for someone to notice, because most of the time human resources is a kind of magic anyways.

But she decided to open it up and have a look, and the first spell she looked at involved laying her naked on a white sheet in the front yard and throwing popcorn on her until she was covered. I'm not entirely sure what that was supposed to accomplish but it was hilarious at the time.

For now mom's staying fully clothed, but knowing us, I don't think the neighbours would have been the least bit surprised.

Sometimes I wonder how these things get made up though. I can just see a bunch of guys sitting around a fire saying "dude, what will we do to end this drought? Jumping up and down on one leg really didn't help."

"I know, maybe we should get a woman naked and throw popcorn at her."

16x365: Leanne

All summer the news followed the developments: the brutal murder of a teen-aged girl, the suspects, the guilty stepfather and the tearful funeral, where her grandfather placed a single eagle feather on her coffin before it was lowered into the ground, to honour her aboriginal heritage. Watching the footage it was clear that she was a really special person, that everyone in her community knew her and she had touched everyone she had come into contact with. The whole town was devastated by her absence.

And in all of this I somehow missed the fact that the town they were talking about was my own, and she had not only been a student at my school but in the same grade as me.

I walked into Latin on the first day of school to find that our teacher had rearranged the room into a circle of chairs around a single, candlelit table with her picture in the middle. We had to share our memories of her, because not only was she in my grade in my school, she had spent an entire semester in the same classes as me, sitting right behind me, and nothing I did seemed to be able to summon any sort of memory of her at all.

When the baton was passed to me to speak, I whispered that I wanted to pass, and our teacher, thinking that I was overcome by emotion, skipped me. It's probably better that way.

My tripod and I go places.

Namely, the light show at the Van Dusen Gardens a week ago.











I spent eight hours at work today so it didn't really feel like the first day back at school.

15x365: Frankie Muniz

Alright, I've never actually met him but in the summer of 2004 I was working in the summer camp program at SFU at the same time they were filming Agent Cody Banks on campus. My group included a gaggle of pre-teen girls. I say gaggle because they kind of reminded me of a bunch of geese, constantly honking "Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!"

They each brought with them backpacks full of fan art, pictures and magazine clippings and would disappear without notice at the randomest of times. We had to call security for them a couple of times which put us on edge for the entire two weeks.

It would definitely be a conversation piece.

I was dragged out to an antique mall this morning to see a chair that my parents think would be perfect for my apartment. It came out of a hair salon somewhere. It's small, square and covered with turquoise vinyl. It has a footrest and a large brass and plastic hairdrying dome attached to a chrome pole, that has been converted to a reading light. I'm mulling it over.

14x365: Laura

She had moved here from Alberta with her mother. Her father was going to join them when he was finished selling the seven golf courses they owned, where they had lions and tigers. When he got here they were going to live in a mansion. She used to go to private school, you know, and didn't know how to spell because kids from private schools didn't need to know how to spell. Her uncle was part of the royal family in England and her cousin was best friends with the president of the United States. She wore old, torn clothing and went to public school just to disguise the fact that she was so rich.

She invented a band called the Payolas and wrote all their songs and got them on the radio. Quite an accomplished career for someone who was only twelve years old.

13x365: Yuri

On tour in Berlin with a youth orchestra, Yuri defected from the Soviet Union one night. When his mother heard, she pleaded with the police to allow her to visit him in the West. She told them that she would take his cello to him, and remind him of how much he loved to play for his comrades and country. She eventually succeeded in convincing them to let her go, and returned to Russia a week later, minus a son and a cello, and never to be heard from again.

Being thus reunited with his instrument and livelihood, Yuri began a brilliant busking career, eventually making it to Canada, where he learned English, became a vegan and joined an artists' collective in the Gulf Islands.

He spent time with us whenever he was on the mainland. He had an odd odour, a mixture of pot, garlic and unidentifiable other substances, though mom would never let him smoke in the house.

The garlic was another matter. There weren't many things for vegans to eat in the 80s, so breakfast for him was always the same thing: homemade eggless, milkless bread toasted with peanut butter and sliced, raw garlic that he would cook himself in our kitchen. It didn't take too many times for him to visit before mom had had enough of his bizarre eating habits and started making him oatmeal with nuts and fruit in it for him.

12x365: the chocolate milk man

He came on Wednesdays and I waited for him faithfully on the stairs of our house, even when it wasn't Wednesday. In fact, one day my parents couldn't find me anywhere so they called the police only to find me sitting on the front steps, waiting for him. He didn't come that day.

I'd sit out on the porch impatiently until I saw the yellow Dairyland truck approach the intersection and then I'd run indoors to drag the nearest adult out to get a two litre carton of chocolate milk.

I used to think he was the most generous man alive before I knew you had to pay for it.

Five things that hurt more than my back hurts right now.

Kind, concerned people have been asking me when I'm going to go to the doctor to get checked out and to be honest, I really don't think I will. Am I sore? Yes, I'm definitely not 100% but I also know that I'm not so bad that the doctor isn't going to suggest anything other than to take some over-the-counter drugs, refrain from strenuous activity and wait. Maybe some light stretching. Besides, I can think of things that have hurt more:

1) I stepped barefoot on a piece of glass the night before a dance recital and waited in Emerg for a doctor to pull it out. When I told him that it was from a mason jar he thought it would be easy but it wasn't because the piece was kind of corkscrew shaped and required a lot of twisting and jiggling to get it out. He told me he stuck some anaesthetic cream on it but I don't believe him, and he told me to stay off it for a few days. I danced on it the following night but by then it had subsided to a dull, persistent ache.

2) I always laugh at the cat runs fullspeed down the hallway and skids into the closet door as she's trying to turn. That's exactly what I did one morning when I heard the phone. I leapt out of bed, ran out the door, and while I was turning to run down the hall, my left foot slipped on the laminate and I skidded across the floor, catching my thumb on the frame of the bathroom door.

At first I thought it was broken but after a few days I started to regain mobility in my thumb and wrist, though it was a good three onths before I was able to squeeze the shampoo out of the bottle. There was one other thing though: the rug burn on my upper thigh, hip and left breast because I happened to be buck naked at the time. First the rugburn hurt and after a few days it started to itch and there are some things you just can't scratch in public.

3) At my rowing club we had a ramp to get down to the water, the angle of which changed with the tides. When carrying boats down this ramp, we had to put the boat over our heads and the order of people to carry goes from tallest to smallest down the ramp, which means I've always been the last person down. That also means that there's a point in time while we're all going down the ramp where only two of the eight people are actually holding the 4-500 lb boat up. Most of the time I was okay with that. You just lock your elbows and walk slow.

But one day in November of 2003 I just wasn't at my best. I don't know why, but I just felt kind of weak and tired. I had the boat held over my head, people began to drop off in the middle and then all of a sudden I felt something under my left shoulderblade snap. My left arm buckled and the boat came down in a controlled fall on top of my shoulder. I don't know what did more damage - that or the fact that I raced on it the next day but I was out for months and it never completely healed.

4) When I was really young I had a particularly nasty strep infection that turned my body overnight into one big angry red rash that was particularly bad around my face, armpits and genitals. I was prescribed penicillin and sent home, only to return to hospital, because the penicillin had caused my kidneys to fail and my skin was no longer one big angry rash, but one big angry open oozing, weeping sore.

Too bad I didn't know this at the time:



5) When I was seven they were busy replacing one of the bridges in a local park and had dug a big pit out for the footings. Beside the pit was the older, narrower bridge, scheduled to be replaced. I came down the hill towards the bridge only to find that it was full of people who would not move when I called at them so since I couldn't stop I missed the bridge, flew over the pit and landed underneath my bike at the bottom of the creek. I don't know where those people went but they certainly didn't come to help me. Twats.

A smashing good time

I don't do resolutions. I had meant to do the cliche 10 most memorable posts of 2007 or a recap about the past year but I was in a car accident Sunday night, our vehicle is a write-off and I'm sore so I'll post whatever I feel like and you will humour me by reading it.

I prefer to call it an amateur seatbelt demonstration, because it occurred to me as I flew into my seatbelt that I could have been flying elsewhere instead. Or perhaps a whoa, there actually were airbags in there? demonstration, because the dashboard said they were there but it was used when we bought it so you can never be sure.

I wasn't particularly scared or hurt or anything, just shocky for a while. There's a point when you relax because you realize that there's really nothing you can do. The airbags deploy in a disorienting puff of grey fog and you're thrown first forwards and then sideways and you grab your sister because you know she's alright but she's screaming and you really want her to shut up. And then you go find the passenger in the other car who is alright but she's screaming because the driver's hunched over into the steering wheel, but he's alright. He's just in shock.

I'm not sure if I'm the least beaten up of everyone or if it's that I don't bruise easily and I have a relatively high tolerance for pain. No way to tell. I didn't feel like lifting any boxes at work yesterday so I didn't.

My mom has large bruises where her seatbelt cut into her upper thighs. At first the one looked like a blue arrow pointing toward her crotch. Since then, the bruise has gotten about six times larger, and now looks like blue and purple flames coming from the general area of her crotch, like the kind of flames people stick on the sides of their cars. We've been making jokes about it.

I took a picture for insurance purposes, and even though she was wearing underwear, I'm not going to post it. She asked me not to, but I wouldn't have anyways.