Everything is good.

At the beginning of the summer I was working somewhere where I wasn't particularly happy. I have nothing against the people, really, and I wasn't being screwed over in any way. There doesn't always have to be a reason why you come home tired and feeling crappy and mildly dissatisfied every night. Sometimes it just happens and you can't put your finger on why.

Long story short, I switched jobs and everything about it was awesome and I'm actually kind of sad that I'm leaving because every morning I've worked there I've woken up, hopped in the shower and thought yay, I'm going to work. No complaints about anyone or anything. I have not had a single bad day there and if I wasn't going back to school I'd just stay. I'll go back next summer, if I can swing it.

But still, I know that I really couldn't stay there forever. As much as everything's awesome, I'll get a degree and then I'll be on the lookout for something that actually relates to it and better pay. And to avoid being disowned, I'll be doing a master's degree. And once I have my master's degree I'll be way too overqualified to go back to doing peoples' filing.

You know the scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is looking back at the parties they used to have at Fezziwig's and he's saying that they had so much fun, but they had no money? For some reason it comes to mind.

I'm not sad to be going back to school. I'm taking a bunch of really cool sounding courses, one of which is with the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, who as far as I can tell, has not taught an undergrad course for eight years. I've already read the recommended texts and 25% of the assigned readings and they're dense so needless to say I'm soooo psyched.

This semester is going to be soooo good.

My mom used to be obsessed with taking pictures of us on the first day of school. For some reason or other, I felt compelled to grab my camera as I was running out the door in the morning yesterday and I took this. Probably for the same reason as the school photos. I'm just documenting the moment, I guess. It's my penultimate day of work shot.

Two things I don't get:

The first is something that seems to be happening more and more often these days - I have a drink or two and then cut myself off for the night and then some dumbass has to come over and either tell me I should be drinking more, or asks why I'm not with the same intent. My reply is that I have to work the next morning, to which they always counter that they also have to work the next morning, that they wake up earlier in the morning than me and that they work longer hours doing something harder than me.

I have yet to understand exactly what they intend to accomplish. Am I supposed to think they're cool or something because they've established that they're idiots with crappy jobs?

The next thing is why people insist upon having sex in cars right outside my door, which happens to also be just underneath my bedroom window. I'm quite certain there are tons of parking lots out there that are far more private, or at least there are ones that aren't right up against where I live so that when I step outside for a run I see a whole lot more than I needed to see.

I have a two million candlepower flashlight that I guess I could have used on them last night but I'm too polite.

Monet to Dali

A coworker and I took a couple of hours off during the day to see the Monet to Dali exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She'd already been but she really badly wanted to see it again, and I can see why. Lots of good stuff there both by big names like Matisse, Picasso, van Gogh and Monet, as well as quite a few I hadn't heard of.

It was nice to see some Rodin sculptures up close, including the Thinker, because it's even easier to see in person than in pictures what a truly talented sculptor he was. The same goes for van Goghs. Goregeous colours, movement, intensity. All good stuff.

As always, I see things I like, attempt to commit their names to memory and then forget them the minute I leave the exhibit, so unfortunately I can't really say exactly what it was I liked. I'd know them if I saw them.

Now that I've thought of it, my favourite of the exhibit was one by a German painter. It was painted as if you are the artist looking through the mirror at yourself and the room behind you. The artist's image appears to be approaching the mirror, with a look of disgust, holding a cloth with which he might possibly be using in the near future to blot himself out. Real concert tickets and letters are wedged in the edges of the mirror, so it was sort of a collage.

The others that stick out in my mind were a flat, kind of cubist painting of a river in blues, greens and oranges, a large canvas of a mother and child and one by a Czech painter - abstract in really bright colours and geometric shapes of a girl playing with a ball.

It's strange how peoples tastes can vary so widely, though. One woman near me was exclaiming over a painting of a villa in a Mediterranean setting which was done in a palette of pale pinks, yellows, sage greens and washed out blue. The colours were exactly the same colours that American artists use when they're painting pictures of adobe huts and cacti in the deserts of the American southwest, which are also coincidentally the exact same colours used to paint hospital interiors. They make me want to vomit every time I see them painted together anywhere.

The same goes for Dali. Some people like him and I don't. I like surrealism, but I just don't like Dali. There's nothing subtle about his paintings. They're well excecuted but they feel crude and blunt to me, like American humour. It's like they're slapping you upside the head and screaming out I'M SURREAL! I BET YOU DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE HOW FUCKING SURREAL I AM! And since every painting is a conversation, I say no shit, you're surreal, and then walk away in search of something less pretentious.

A year ago today I had a lot of dumb ideas, none of which I have realized.
Two years ago today I was working 7 days a week and went a little insane.

No better than when I started

I have less than a week left at work and how do I feel? Well, oddly enough I feel like I could work for another four months if I wasn't going back to school. Normally by this time in the summer I've been dying to leave for at least three weeks.

So what's different this year? Not a lot. The people are different, but they're just as nice as last year's people so that doesn't count. The job I've been doing is just as tedious, the building the same, the workday and breaks the same, everything else the same. The only thing I can think of is that this year I've been making almost seven dollars per hour more than I was last year. It's amazing what a decent wage can do to your sense of job satisfaction.

And yet, when I look at what the contents of my bank account will be after my last paycheque this summer and subtract the aggregate amount I have received to date in scholarships, really I've barely broken even, and it feels like it's only going to get worse, seeing as my rent is set to increase early next year and my tuition for this semester alone jumped 25% over what I paid in spring for the same number of courses. Ouch.

Luckily at school there is this nice hare krisna guy who cooks special hare krisna vegan food and will give you a whole plate of it for whatever change you have in your pocket at the time. That, plus a generous helping of all the spiders you can catch might actually provide enough protein for healthy skin, hair and fingernail growth.

Still, I think I really should get off my ass and apply for some more scholarships. I could say something like hi, my name is Erin. I used to live in a foster home. I am the president of a really large student union. They give me a budget and I spend it responsibly. I want to get a PHD so that I can wear one of those cool puffy hats. I can't think of a better reason to go through the pain of doctoral studies than that. My friends and family say I'm retarded, but in spite of being differently abled, I get decent grades. I will likely use my education to publish several books of theories and study that will be read by 10-15 like-minded souls and ignored by all of society, and this is how I intend to make the world better.

And yet in the end I always look at the sappy bullshit I write for these things and just decide to go to work instead. It's easier.

In which I actually put my degree to some use

So it looks like my entire day today is putting together a bunch of stuff with InDesign for my dad's job because he had a graphic designer that was willing to work for him but he didn't understand what exactly she was asking for and also, because he only got this job recently and isn't completely organized yet, he missed her deadline. Lucky me.

I'm probably making a mistake doing it in InDesign, because it's a program that my father neither has nor is familiar with, but I find it a lot easier to do layout stuff with that than Word, which is what he was using with little success.

The upside of doing a bunch of unpaid freelance work for your dad is that you have something else to stick in your portfolio, with which to show people that might potentially pay you to do things that you are eighteen times awesome. The downside is that it is unnecessarily difficult because I'm asking him for the content of this brochure and he's saying he doesn't really have it yet and talking to me over my shoulder while I'm trying to work.

Ideally, I just like people to give me stuff to lay out with an idea as to style and colour scheme and then I want them to leave me alone. Then I'll print out a copy, let them write all over it and make the suggested changes.

That being said, I had no real plans for today so I may as well be doing something useful. Not only that, he might consider getting or heavily subsidizing an upgrade to InDesign CS3 for me. These things tend to work out eventually.

Trying the limits of my patience

So here I am talking to someone I knew in high school and she asks me if I know of some sort of site or service that is kind of like Pandora, which is no longer available outside of the US. I suggest Last.fm because I am somewhat obsessed with that site and also it makes for better at work listening than the radio, most of the time.

This would be the time that a particular person decides to butt into the conversation. "You talking about facebook?" he asks. We filled him in on what we were talking about. "I just use facebook," he says. We continue our conversation about music and internet radio. "I just use facebook," he repeats. We keep talking. "I just use facebook," he says a third time. "Why don't you just use facebook?"

"This is boring," he says as we continue to talk about music. "This is boring, seriously. I want to go. Nothing's happening. This is boring. I could be playing poker right now." We were doing our best to ignore him by this point. When you dignify them with a response you only encourage them.

The problem with these sorts of people is that they really feel like their contributions are essential to your conversation, so when you walk away, they'll follow you around. The other problem is that other than being irritating, they're pretty much harmless, and never do anything particularly bad so it's not like you can really tell them to piss off.

The problem with me is that sometimes I am far too diplomatic for my own good. I have a hard time telling people that irritate me that I can't stand them. I'll go out of my way to avoid contact with these people, to the point of not answering my phone when they call, not replying to their emails and being on the exact opposite end of the room. But when I'm cornered, I'm polite, so I guess I come across as being really nice, which only attracts more of these people to me. This would be the case with this person, who makes a b-line in my direction every time he sees me at a party.

So while he follows both of us up to the bus stop, we're talking about music from Eastern Europe and Israel, he says "Eastern Europe? So they sing in French or something?" We continue talking and then he says "That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh." And that's about the time when I decided that I didn't feel like catching the bus and walked an hour to get to the other party I was planning on going to. Nothing like a good long walk in the dark when you're set to explode.

825

I never really wrote this thing for an audience. I mean, it's cool that people read, and it's cool that some even bother to link me, but the fact is that I just write stuff down so I won't forget. I am my biggest reader, as my sister found out one night when she was sleeping over. I'll post something, read it over, then edit it five or six times before I can leave it alone, and then I'll pick a month at random and read to see where my head was at. Maybe it's pure narcissism but I find my own writing really entertaining.

It's so easy to forget the details. There are some things that I remember very well. I could tell you random useless stuff, like how Kiichiro Toyoda consulted a fortune teller who told him that the key to his company's success was starting the names of all his car models with the letter C, and that's why up until a few years ago, all Toyota models had C names: Corolla, Camry, etc. I know which texts are included in the canon for the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Tewahedo Church.

Can I remember what I had for lunch two days ago? Nope, not a chance. So how will I know in a year if I don't write it down?

This blog has become a repository for all the crap that gets stuck in my head, some good, most of it not. I find that the more I throw out there, the more I have. I guess it works like love, only less warm and fuzzy.

That being said, I have a love/hate relationship with this blog. I have never once been happy with the content, the template, the name, the domain, pretty much everything about it and it drives me up the fucking wall.

Tonight I have places to go and people to see. I'll be back in approximately 12-18 hours with photos.

Paint it black.

I've been looking at the canvasses again and how a couple of them have things sketched out on them already. Grandma painted sailing ships and roses, mostly. And I was thinking that I'd feel kind of bad painting right over them, even though I really don't feel like finishing them for her. I've always taken issue with the lack of variety and imagination in her paintings, just as she's always taken issue with the fact that my style has never been hers.

I painted her a picture once of a hummingbird in dots of really intense coloured watercolours and her reaction was that she had to teach me how to paint and to shade things. When I replied that I already knew how to shade things, her reply was that I didn't do it right. I really haven't painted much since, not so much because of the criticism, but more because I've just never gotten the hang of it.

The painting was eventually framed and placed on the wall in her kitchen above Kalmalka Lake, just below a framed copy of a poem grandad wrote for her. As I grew a little more discerning, I was able to pick out more and more flaws in my work until I came to really dislike it. Still, I would kind of like it back, even though it's most likely that my uncle threw it in the trash several years ago.

It always seemed that everything I did she had done better so that instead of taking an interest in things, she was always finding ways that she'd outdone mom and I. I never figured out why she was always competing with me. What could she possibly gain from it? What could anyone from that side of the family possibly gain from such petty rivalries?

But you know those huge wigs that women used to wear with fancy decorations in them? I was thinking of painting one with a ship in it. That or waves of spaghetti, a ship and meatball whales. Or squid. Everyone loves squid. Tesellated squid. Squid knocking down buildings. Squid in phone booths. One day you'll break the glass only to discover someone's replaced the fire alarm with a squid.

See how hard this is for me?

Scalpel, please

It's strange. I wake up at the exact same time every morning and have a reasonably short shower. I usually get out of the shower more or less at the same time. So why is it that the rest of my morning is always so random? Some mornings I have a nice leisurely time getting ready for work and others I can barely finish half a cup of coffee before I run out the door. How does that happen?

I guess I just have off days. At one point in time on Monday I noticed that the skin around the big ugly wart on my finger was beginning to blister so I tore it off, and then because the wart was now sticking out of my finger like a column, I began to hack at it with my scissors until I'd sliced off about three milimetres off the top of it. It didn't hurt because there are no nerves inside warts but it did occur to me that I'd look really weird if someone came to my desk and I was cutting chunks out of my finger.

It also occurred to me that what I had just done was kind of gross, so I took my scissors to the washroom to wash them off with some soap and then I found a bandaid for my finger. Shortly afterward it started to itch like crazy. That's a good thing, right?

I'd much rather go see a doctor who can burn the damn thing off but apparently it's not big and ugly enough for me to get a referral. No matter. That was Monday and this is Thursday and the wart is now half its original size and shrinking because my scissor skills are so damn awesome. Black market surgery, anyone? I'll cure what ails you.

Garlic breath

This is a purple tomato. It doesn't really look overly purple in the picture so you'll just have to take my word for it. I just harvested it from my balcony and I really want to eat it but I kind of feel like someone else should be with me so I can share it with them because it's going to be a pretty momentous occasion. I mean, I've eaten purple potatoes and purple carrots, but never a purple tomato.

Yesterday I ended up wandering up and down Commercial Drive with Lindsay and others looking for a place to eat. We ignored our gut, which was craving Caribbean and went for pasta instead at a restaurant that was packed with people in the 45+ category where drinks were expensive and three out of the four of us were not particularly happy with our meals. Oh well. These things happen.

I think my pasta was supposed to have a tomato sauce, but the sauce seemed more like a half cup of oil with a couple pieces of tomato in it and I think it was probably the oil that gave me heartburn all night. That and garlic breath. I still have garlic breath from that meal. It won't go away.