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.