Streets are filled with people

I don't know if I'm completely sold on this blogger beta stuff just yet, but I can always change it back, right? I just needed a bit of a change today. I know some of my longtime readers have a hate hate relationship with the black and white alligator above. Sorry. It just fit better than my green one, and at least it's not obscuring any text this time.

I have a recurring dream in which the big earthquake we're overdue for happens and I'm stranded alone in Surrey.

I pull a small boy out from under some rubble and from then on he follows me around. He tells me that he wants to see his parents and I tell him that maybe we'll find them even though somehow I know that they're both dead. I always tell him that we're going to my house first, but it's on the other side of the river and the bridges are out.

We're walking and trying to find a way across the Fraser River and the streets are filled with people and we're all silent.

I dressed up like a lawyer at school today. I really, really like wearing those convocation gowns. They're comfy and I think they look really good. All the more reason to get a PhD.

Okanagan antique malls

I'm going to knit this into something for my mom. Not sure just what yet but they're her colours. It's merino wool and it was dyed by Brooke on Etsy. She's awesome and so is Etsy.

Mom had an entire antique mall in a frenzy a couple weeks ago when one of the vendors suddenly noticed the pin she had on her jacket. It isn't Sherman, but it's a very good fake and it's got Swarovski crystals in it so it shines rainbows in the sun.

It's the sort of jewelry that you see most often on old ladies that dress up nicely to eat pork pies and overcooked vegetables in the cafeteria at the Bay downtown. There's nothing wrong with that kind of jewelry. It's just that it's not all that popular with younger people.

The woman just inside the door noticed the pin and immediately labeled it a Sherman and began exclaiming over the fact that people buy that sort of stuff but they put it away and never wear it and here was a woman who obviously has taste and wears this antique jewelry on her jacket. Apparently this woman was a little bizarre, herself, and from her, the message was relayed telephone-style into all the other rooms, such that mom achieved had a sort of celebrity status by the time she had made it through the entire store.

They went to another antique store and found a book about wine that was published in 1851. It was only $20 so they bought it for my uncle. He didn't really look at it at first but then as he started to leaf through it he became increasingly more excited. It just so happened that it gave a detailed description of a region in France before the great grape blight of 1853 and some other place where a fire destroyed a specific cultivar of grapes, and that was a very, very exciting thing. He's so funny sometimes.

Get Animated!

Tyger (2006) by Guilherme Marcondes

Last night was my sister's birthday and she wanted to see a screening of a bunch of short films at Emily Carr as part of World Animation Day. Unfortunately there was no program so I'm having a hard time remembering exactly what I saw.

The first half of the screening was a selection of local films, some of which I liked and others not so much. I think the beauty of having a plot for your film is that it suggests a logical time and place to end it. When there is no plot there really should just be a time limit on things. There were a couple films that were just random stuff that dragged and dragged.

The highlights of the first half was a film (I can't remember the name) in which a man chased a homeless man through photographs of the streets of Vancouver. The animation itself was pencil-drawn. It's an idea I've had before but not something I've ever done so kudos to the people who made it because it was excellent. Stillwaters by Andrew Ford was also very well done. Oddly enough, the other one that stands out was a film called Fallen Woman, in which a naked pregnant woman develops super powers when she breaks her leg. It was... bizarre? Kind of silly? Unique. I kind of liked it for its randomness.

The second half of the screening was a selection of international films which were all very excellent. I managed to track down two of them, and I'll keep my eye out for some of the others.


Puppet (2006) by Patrick Smith

Books!

I dragged a mountain of books down to the library downtown. The strike's finally over so it felt good to get rid of them. Over the summer I got into the habit of walking there over lunch and either taking out or taking back a book, but inevitably I ended up with a lot of library books all over my livingroom. I went to renew a couple one day, only to find out that one had been requested by someone else and would not renew, so the day they were due I walked down to the library only to find a picket line around it.

Just as well. I wasn't finished reading the book at the time. But by now that poor person has been waiting for that book since July, so I kind of felt like I should return it sooner rather than later.

I brought home a new mountain of books for my papers but I was surprised to find that the VPL really doesn't seem to have many books on Afghanistan and its culture and I'm not sure why. Just like I don't understand why Canada doesn't have any form of world-renowned expert on Afghanistan and we're fighting a war there. You'd think that if we were spending a lot of money and lives getting tangled up in a foreign conflict we'd want to make an effort to learn something about the place and the people but apparently not.

But that's not what my paper's about at all. Just dialogue and communication, paradigm and concepts of place and time. Same old same old.

I picked up another book that looks like it would be useful for another course too: The Elephant in the Room, Silence and Denial in Everyday Life by Eviatar Zerubavel. I was looking for something completely different at the time and by complete coincidence his name jumped out at me. I need to squeeze 20 pages out of my family's systematic forgetting of illegitimate children, divorces and mixed-race relationships and it should help. I'm trying to track down an article by Hallbwachs for the same paper and I'm not finding it all that easily.

I find the problem with the library checkout is that I end up walking away from the counter with a huge armfull of books and there never seems to be a discrete, graceful way of transferring them to my bag. How do other people do this? I never see them having this problem.

I crouched, took off my backpack, put my stack of books on the floor and began to load them. It was then that I caught sight of a familiar looking shoe. I looked up and found myself staring right into the eyes of a guy I have a class with and for a brief second he looked at me as if I was completely retarded as he was walking out with another guy.

He really shouldn't stare, not with those tight hipster jeans of his not when they really accentuate the flabbiness of his inner thighs.

I need one of those in-your-jacket mitten strings

Out on Hastings tonight it was chilly but not freezing. As I stood waiting for my bus, a man began to spray the leaves on the sidewalk with a hose. It was remarkably ineffective. After an hour of spraying around peoples' feet he gave up. I'm glad he did because the bottom of my right shoe is cracked and leaks, and I was running out of dry sidewalk to stand on.

Hopping off the bus, the air knifed through my clothes. I had missed my stop and the sudden change in temperature caught me off guard. I was alright though, until I had to wait to cross the street. It's a long light. I nearly froze to death waiting for it.

From then on I began to shiver quite a bit and shuffled all the way home. I soaked my hands in coolish water to warm them up because I hate the itchy, swollen feeling I get when they heat up too fast, but I had to soak them extra long because one of my fingers just refused to be any colour other than white.

I forgot my mittens today. Luckily I was wearing a cool hat. Secretly I'm waiting for someone to ask me where I got it so I can say I knit it myself.

The singer sounds like he's underwater

No, no, he says. There's a glottal stop in it. You've got to close your throat.

On the computer there's the sound of some mp3 I ripped from one of my cds. The cymbals are a muddy, high pitched static. I wonder why it's such a low quality when it didn't have to be. I could have chosen a higher bitrate but I didn't. I could find the cd and do it again but I don't.

I gain a strange, backward sense of satisfaction from that. It's like mediocrity is A okay if it's self-willed.

It's days like these that I start digging through my archives so I can cop out and say "one year ago I said this:" but though there are good posts back there somewhere, they're never on days when I'm looking for an out.

I think I'm finally off of the walking around my apartment naked thing. Wearing clothes means I don't need to use as much heat. Besides, the office across the street just reorganized such that now one of the desks faces the window, and the guy who sits there looks straight across the street and into my window.

I'm thinking of making a sign for him that says

Hi, is your name Sean? I have your mail.

See if he writes back.

Busy

I'm writing a paper now but because it's a topic that's very close to me I have to put myself down as a source. It's a book about the history of a town that my family came from and I think some key information is wrong. The problem is that it's the only book written about that town and for better or for worse, it's published and my opinion is not.

I saw someone wearing a sweater the other day that I liked and I thought it was something that I could knit myself. The only problem is that if I were to do something like that, and if I were to actually finish it, by the time it was finished it would not be in style anymore. It would be retro. I guess that means it would be in style.

What is clear though is that I really need to update my wardrobe a little. It's not that my old clothes are really old or unwearable. It's just that I've lost a lot of weight and stuff just doesn't fit right anymore. It's baggy and hangs in a way that isn't the least bit flattering.

With that in mind, I started a new bag of clothes for charity today. Maybe I'll walk it over sometime this week.

I'm a little pressed for time today so I'm cutting this short. If I owe you emails I will send them out tomorrow. I promise.

(north)American Sentences

By far the coolest thing about blogging is that you learn things. The people over at NaBloPoMo have introduced me to American sentences, which are similar to haiku in that they're observations and they're 17 sylables but minus the 5-7-5. A much better explanation can be found here. I must admit I'm charmed by the form, if not by the name, so here are some (north)American sentences in somewhat chronological order that describe bits of my day:

Smashed egg permanently glued to inside of carton, one less breakfast.

I forget to wave to the circles man, he still circles regardless.

Man on bus interjects that he hates art, but I still love Picasso.

Chinese man wipes fog from bus window, fog returns, the world is obscured.

Sit with me, he says; lecture hall floor tacky underfoot so I don't.

Hot coffee clutched in my fingers stands between me and certain frostbite.

Dust doesn't care whether I want it here, coats things when I'm not looking.

Good things come to people who wait but I still hate being on dial-up.

World map on my desk: pen bisects Peru, computer north of Congo.

Dinner is finished already but angry stomach begs to differ.

Once again post, picture, mismatched, continuity police be damned.

It's raining

I'm living on the top floor of a building these days and this is a new thing for me. I've always either slept in the basement or if I've been on the main floor there has always been an insulated attic between me and the roof.

No longer.

When I was little we had one bad tarping experience in Guides which was coupled with a bad tent location experience and an unusually bad rainstorm experience. The inside of our tent filled with water and our bedding sopped it up while we slept so we woke up cold and miserable.

We identified our mistakes so it would never happen again but the experience left me a little paranoid about camping in the rain. Forever after, every time I have heard raindrops on the roof of our tent, it has kept me wide awake at high alert all night. Aside from that I love camping.

That it has been raining hard for the past week is not unusual at all. It's October and this is a rainforest. But one thing is unusual for me and that is that for the first time ever I can hear the rain on the roof and I keep feeling like I should be checking for leaks in places and I've been waking up when the rain has been particularly heavy expecting to be wet.

It doesn't help that the wind yesterday blew some water underneath my balcony door so that it almost made it over the threshold.

Spam spam spam spammity spam

1) I found this video via My Goregeous Somewhere.

2) My mom grew up on fried spam sandwiches. One of her colleagues grew up on stir-fried spam and spam wontons. Spam touches us all.

3) When Grandma used to live at Chilliwack General Hospital, we used to roll her out to the restaurant around the corner. It was a crappy restaurant but her wheelchair was far too large for the wheelchair lifts on vehicles and she was too heavy to push for any great distance.

Through careful experimentation we had determined that the only thing on the menu that met our standards of edibility was the chicken quesadillas. So one day we were there with Grandma and some aunts and uncles and we put in our orders:

Abby: "I'll have the chicken quesadillas, please."
Myself: "I'll also have the quesadillas, thanks."
Mom: "I think I'll have the quesadillas as well."
My aunt: "The kwes-a-DILL-ahs look really good. I think I'll have them too."

The waitress asked her if she meant the quesadillas and she replied that yes, she wanted the kwesadillas.

Since then every time we have seen quesadillas on menus we have had a bit of a laugh at her expense. It's mean but we can't help it.

4) The previous didn't have much to do with spam, but it does relate to the movie. I feel I have to justify myself because you never know when the thematic police will strike.

5) I just spelled never with a silent k. Knever say knever, and all that. No wonder people think I'm a dork.

6) As you may recall, the Vikings loved spam.

7) Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Exactly. Next semester I should convince someone to supervise me while I do a directed studies project on spam in popular culture. It is a topic that is sadly underrepresented in academia.