Chocolate

I interupt this broadcast for an important announcement:

!!! I FOUND MY PHONE !!! I FOUND MY PHONE !!! I FOUND MY PHONE !!!

Thank you. You will be returned to your normal programming shortly.

I really, strongly want some chocolate. At the moment, it's not a want but a need. Alas, I have none. I have chocolate syrup, but it is not the same. I also have hot chocolate powder, but recently my parents switched brands to a far richer, more chocolatey tasting hot chocolate so now the stuff I have tastes kind of like sugar and food colouring in comparison and I don't really feel like drinking it anymore.

I thought that maybe I could make myself something chocolatey flavoured, like brownies or pudding from scratch with some cocoa powder but I don't have any of that, even though my mom insists that I do. I don't even know how to make chocolate pudding from scratch but I figure it must involve cocoa powder and sugar and milk.

Other than that I really have nothing to say. Here I was, studying diligently, completing an assignment that I thought was due this Friday but apparently it's due next week. I guess that means I'm ahead. You don't notice how much time you waste commuting until you don't have to do it at all. My apartment's starting to look strangely clean.

I still want chocolate.

What will he run away from next?

Photo-op

Something about taking my camera downtown today made me see shots everywhere:

A person in silhouette, leaning towards the huge window in Harbour Centre, with the fog floating below the mountains behind.

Stacks of chairs in empty rooms.

Sunset reflected off of Gastown's towers.

Sunset turning the naked marble ladies on the Sun Tower golden.

A woman leaning against a wall in twilight.

An old man feeding pigeons out his window in an alley.

And yet for some reason or other, I took none. I have an irrational fear of everything. I have a very rational fear that I will never outgrow that.

My dad informs me that his mother fell out of her wheelchair on Saturday. When she gets left in her wheelchair for too long, she gets impatient and sore and tries to climb back into bed, which, for a ninety-year-old, three-hundred-pound woman who is unable to walk and has difficulty pulling herself up in bed, isn't the smartest thing to do. Unfortunately for her, her wing of the hospital was understaffed at the time. She's in a lot of pain and has been in and out of consciousness ever since. The shock of the fall has caused her to come down with an infection, which at her age, might be more serious than it sounds. You never know.

With that came the news that my grandmother's roommate, Margaret, suffered a massive stroke on the same day and her family is there on deathwatch. I'd be sad to lose her. She's such a delightful woman and she gets along with my grandmother so well.

I don't really need any comforting words. I'm just writing stuff down.

Grass stains

And here we were, watching the news on the television, and my mom complains that the grass stains on the kid in the liquid Tide commercial are incredibly fake. "Look at that," she says, "it would never be like that. You'd never have grass stains like that."

I turn towards the television to see a smiling kid with a patch of green running diagonally from his shoulder across his chest. On one leg, there is another green patch on his upper thigh, and on the other leg, a green patch on his shin, below his knee. "You get those circles on the knees," she said.

"And on the elbows," I replied, "and maybe around your wrists." She knows these things because she's someone's mother. I know them because I'm someone's child. Obviously people who work for advertising agencies are neither. I've always been convinced that they are sub-human and this only confirms it.

The chest "grass stain" confused me though. I sat there for a while, puzzled, before I thought of the solution. "That kid had to have been dragged face down by his feet," I said to her, "that's the only way to explain the stain on his chest..." Mom started to laugh.

"But it kind of goes over his shoulder, doesn't it?" Mom didn't reply. "So that means that instead of being dragged flat along his chest by his feet, he'd have to be dragged at about a 45 degree angle, I'm guessing, with his feet at an altitude of a metre or so..."

"But at that altitude, coupled with the bagginess of his shirt and the friction of the grass, the shirt would bunch up near his chest and result in very different grass stains, possibly even on the inside of the bottom hem of the shirt. Not to mention, he'd have noticeable abrasions on his face and possibly chipped teeth..."

"Alright, enough!" Mom said, still laughing. "Stop being so intelligent!"

Tomorrow my sister's going to rescue me from school downtown so we can go eat Ethiopian and browse all those awesome hipster consignment stores that we love so much. If I suddenly come home with a custard yellow herringbone chiffon dress with matching bolero jacket and crenoline you will know who to blame.

Well, actually, I'm still on the lookout for a decent tweed jacket. I haven't been able to find one that fits me in a way I find satisfactory yet, even though I've been looking for a while. When I find the right one I'll know, and then I'll spend too much on it, no doubt.

I'll take my camera if the fog lets up.

Sketching

I'd been feeling kind of intimidated by the nice heavy cardstock and hard cover of my sketchbook for a while, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I came across a binder full of cheap looseleaf blank paper that I must have taken from the school lost and found in my dad's office one year, just before summer.

The nice thing about it is that not only was it free, it's also got crappy paper in it, so I don't have to worry about wasting perfectly good supplies. Lots of odd stuff seems to come out of my pencil on those sheets.

Whereas before I was doing stuff like this:



Now I'm doing stuff like this:



Is this a good thing? I don't know. I honestly don't know.

The History of Shopping Carts is something particularly interesting that I read today.

Hocus Pocus by Focus

When I was 7 or 8ish and my dad and I were home alone, sometimes we would crank the stereo all the way up and listen to lots of vinyl. We have a lot of it. One day he pulled out a copy of the album Moving Waves by Focus, and explained that there was one song that I absolutely had to listen to because Thijs van Leer had such an amazing voice.

It was so weird and different that I never forgot that day.

What can I tell you about this song? It's Dutch progressive rock meets yodeling. Yes, yodelling. See for yourself. It is awesome and entertaining.

I may not be interesting, but this is

Dirty Car Art.

I read a lot

I'm beginning to I'm beginning to think that maybe this online education thing is making me into a very boring person. All I do is read. And read. And read.

Then I sit down here and do I have something interesting to post? No.

Today I read three separate articles with different opinions on Simon & Schuster's takeover of Distican and sometimes when I read these things I think that really what we need to do is shut down the border and tell America to stop treating us like we're their colony, but that won't happen, so abandon hope.

Then I read a bit from Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, about how a) the best approach to foreign development is to stop telling people that they need help all the time and only offer assistance when they ask for it and b) we should stop looking at fancy schmancy technologies all the time to fix other peoples' problems for them, because all that does is make them more dependent on us for spare parts and oil and such. Makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Then I read the last bit of a novel for sociology about a Jewish cyborg. I'm not entirely sure how a machine can practice any sort of religious faith, but meh.

Oh, and then there was an article about technology and control.

Yep. That was my day.

Oh Alphonso

Off the plank with ye!

I still have a bruise on the palm of my hand from Friday, when I jumped out of Kathy's car at an intersection and hit the crosswalk button with a little too much enthusiasm.

I lost my phone last Wednesday and I've been kind of weird ever since.

My jeans have passed into the realm of the truly sacred by sprouting a hole in the crotch. I have nothing against holy jeans, really. A rip here, a bit of fraying there can look kind of cool, but when an old pair of jeans gets a hole in the crotch, I find that I have the strong urge to not wear them for anything other than hanging out around home or maybe doing yardwork.

I always get concerned that people will look at me and then think that I have some sort of malignant crotch rot, which is really stupid, because assuming that people are kind of like me, they don't spend a lot of time staring at and noticing those sorts of things. Regardless, I don't like wearing pants when they get too many holes in them.

I finally got paid for the work I did over Christmas. I think I'll go buy myself a new pair of jeans. A pair that doesn't have holes.

This post sucked. Alright, off the plank with me!

Clarification

Frankly, I'm sitting here at a loss for things to say. I took down yesterday's post because it makes me sound far crazier than I actually am. Well, that depends on the day, really.

So, for the four or five people that read that post, let's get some things straight:

1) I live in an area that is kind of wooded and sparsely populated. I hear noises, sometimes, and sometimes those startle me. Not all that often, but sometimes they do.

2) If I'm not going far, I tend not to lock my door, especially when there's no one else around. In this case, I walked around the side of the building, across the lawn and back. That classifies as not far, and therefore it would have made a lot of sense if the door had been unlocked when I got back to it.

3) The door was locked.

4) I was holding my keys in my hand at the time.

5) My short term memory has been going to hell in a handcart lately.

6) Two explanations: I forgot that I locked it behind me, or someone has walked in and locked the door behind them. One benign, the other, maybe not so much.

7) What do you do when faced with two equally plausible scenarios? Go with the lowest common denominator and choose caution. Unlock the door, call loudly up the stairs so you can be sure that if there is someone up there, they will hear you. Then you walk away for a while, giving that person, if they're there, a decent amount of time to show themselves out.

8) Returning a while later, it is only reasonable that I put all my suspicions to rest by checking all of the closets, armed with a large knife.

9) I don't do this often.

True, I was kind of panicky and maybe a touch irrational at the time, but underneath all that there was some rational thought there.

I'm not completely nuts.