Burial at sea.

Today while I was in class a procession of people appeared in the courtyard outside with an inflatable raft that they placed in the pond. Shortly afterward a second group approached carrying a stiff girl on their shoulders like a coffin.

They placed her in the raft and pushed her out into the middle of the pond. It was all quite mysterious and funerary looking, and pretty distracting to boot.

I had to turn back to our class discussion about how the US and UK killed NWICO because they don't like communication rights and why most people have never heard of the CRIS campaign.

When I looked next the courtyard was empty. After class we speculated. Rehearsal? Performance art? Hazing ritual? Fire arrows?

I'm sure we overthought it.

My funk continues

I took this picture a few weeks ago now, and I've been mulling it over ever since.

It's funny how a given medium will predispose you to think in certain ways or see from a particular point of view.

In a lot of ways I think some of my best pictures were taken in the first six months or so that I had my camera. Sure, some of them are really lacking in technical quality, but there was something fresh about them that the ones I take now lack. Maybe it's just me that thinks that, but getting a new camera was kind of like seeing with new eyes.



They say that if you have a hammer things start looking like nails, and for me, suddenly everything was a shot. I had pretty specific ideas about what "shots" looked like and in a way it kind of framed my existence. I was always looking for them. It annoyed me when people told me to take pictures of things where there were no shots.



Meaning, of course, not that there was nothing photo worthy to find there, but that I'd developed a way of seeing that was very hard to shake. Meaning also that gradually all my photos began to look the same.



I used to follow a lot of photoblogs but I found that more than the individual photos, I visited them because of their point of view. Once I'd figured out their style, they became kind of predictable and I'd get bored of them, regardless of what new content they had to offer.



I do this with blog posts too, or at least, I do when I'm on my game (which has not been for the last three months). There's a little monologue that happens in the back of my mind that's constantly concerned with structuring my existence into an interesting post. I see something and already I'm trying to put it into words, experimenting with different phrases more than living through the moment. Eventually that gets old.



My sister said I had taken the same picture before and she was right.

My mother, bringer of blizzards.

My mom wishes to apologise for the snow and cold weather we have been having lately. She believes she brought it on by not putting away the Christmas themed tablecloth that is on the kitchen table.

Forget groundhogs, the real reason why we have six extra weeks of winter is because the table is covered with snowmen and gnomes on skis. Kitschy, kitschy gnomes on skis.





We must rectify this. Stat.

29 cents

One of my friends limped into class the other day. She had fallen down the stairs at the skytrain station while running for the bus and her ankle was swollen to the point of looking gross and deformed. I decided I would go get some ice for her.

I had five minutes. I ran down two flights of stairs and then all the way to the other end of the building to get to the cafeteria where I filled up a cup with ice. I ran into problems at the checkout because apparently ice costs money. Twenty-nine cents worth of money. That's practically theft.

I didn't really have any time to argue and the cashier wasn't really the person to complain to anyways so I paid it. Good thing I had a loon in my pocket.

I ran the ice back upstairs and didn't tell her that it cost money, because that would be petty and stupid. But 29 cents? Bah!

Because who wouldn't want to write a paper about Eugene Hütz's mustache?

For my one class all the readings for this week have been about old school rap and hip hop, its links to the Caribbean, reggae and civil rights movements, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash.

For my other class we've been looking at diasporic identities, the Caribbean, Rastafarianism, voodoo and mythical narratives of Africa as a heartland.

I had a conversation with a colleague from another class today about music because it turns out that he's a huge reggae fan.

I have to come up with a paper topic to hand in in eight hours.

You know what this is all telling me?

I need to write a paper about Balkan Beat Box. Glad you made that leap with me.



I'm going to make it about Eugene Hütz too, because his mustache is awesome.

I have the best major ever.

Thinking green

I'm joining Project Spectrum this time around. It's a self-guided, open-ended collective art project that revolves around four themes over the period of 8 months. The theme for March/April is north/green/stones/earth so I'm going to make something with the above because it wants to be made into something. I'm still working on making up a design so I'm not really sure what it will look like just yet. We'll see.

One thing I know though, is that planning it out has been a lot of fun and completely absorbing so far. I think it's more the time of the semester than anything. Procrastination drives me to jump wholeheartedly into a whole lot of creative things.

You should join me because it's fun and it's cool to see what everybody else comes up with.

There are skunks living underneath the back porch. We are torn between choosing to coexist and choosing to get rid of them because they will likely eat everything out of the garden.

Inopportune times

I've been having computer difficulties lately. Half the time it doesn't turn off when I want it to.

I've also been pretty busy with school. I'm not sure why I don't post anything about what I'm working on there here. I'm still kind of riding a high from finishing a presentation this week. It's a weight off my shoulders and got rave reviews like "cerebral" and "you guys got the conceit of the week."

I would have done a good job by myself, but I think it was definitely improved by the fact that I had an intelligent, agreeable partner to work with. Good to have people to bounce ideas with, especially when they have well thought out ideas that are not the same as mine. I don't learn very much when I'm always the dominant person in the group, which is often.

People are going to be upset with me for saying this but I'm really glad it's raining. If you string too many dry days together, I get nosebleeds. They can last for hours and disrupt everything. The past few weeks I've also had really congested sinuses and it really sucks to need to blow your nose while you're paranoid that you're going to make it start again.

Increasingly these things have been happening at the most inopportune times. In class, while I've been talking to people, on the bus or at night.

The worst night was last week. I spend a lot of time at school on Thursdays - seven straight hours, if I'm not meeting with someone for a project. I usually get home around 11 pm and then I have to be up at 6 for school downtown the next day.

I had a paper due in the morning and it wasn't quite finished. I got home and started working on it and for whatever reason it was slow going. It really shouldn't take all night to come up with 800 words but in this case it did. I was having trouble with it so at 2am I decided to get a couple hours sleep.

I woke up an hour and a half later with my face in a pool of blood. I was groggy and disoriented and it had soaked into my pillow and sheets. Laundry time! I stripped everything off my bed and threw it into the wash.

This was the perfect opportunity to get some more work done on my paper. I wrote at a snail's pace until the sheets were out of the dryer while the cat squawked at me that there were no sheets on the bed.

I made my bed, put the cat to sleep and worked on the paper some more, which was still slow going. Half an hour later, the cat started fussing again. I checked the bed and it was wet. She'd had a seizure and peed all over it.

Why do I only have one set of sheets?

Help preserve an open internet.

You there! In Canada! The CRTC is currently accepting submissions from the public about net neutrality.

Right now, internet access is not regulated in Canada. This allows your internet service provider (Shaw, Rogers, Bell, etc.) to speed up, slow down and block your access to websites and services as it sees fit.

A free and open internet is important for democracy, for communication, business and innovation. You pay for internet access and you should be able to visit anything you want without the interference of your internet service provider.

Please consider sending a submission to the CRTC. There is a form you can fill out to send them a letter so it is relatively painless to do. The deadline for making a submission is tomorrow, Monday February 23.

The petition, CRTC letter and lots of information can be found here.

If you are in the US, you can find out what's happening with the FCC here.

I forsee warm sweaters in my future.

Somehow my father has the magical ability to know about yarn store sales before I do. He clips the ads out of newspapers and leaves them on the keyboard of my computer where I will see them. He does the same for computer sales or anything else he thinks I am interested in purchasing at any given time. It's his way of being helpful.

So we arrived at the rock and gem club show only to find that it wasn't open yet. I had prepared for this inevitability by having $45 in my pocket - more than enough to buy some yarn for a pair of socks. I suggested that we could kill the twenty minutes petting yarn a couple blocks away.

Once there he was thoroughly impressed by the selection and gained some attention for being the only male in the store. I heard the following from his mouth, among others:

"Yarn doesn't go bad. You may as well stock up because the prices are good."

"Look at this! Isn't it soft?"

"It's made out of lama. Lama!"

"Are you sure that's enough for a project?"

"No sense in wasting your time on crappy materials. Why use acrylic when you can use alpaca?"

"What about your next project? You should be thinking three projects ahead!"

These statements are not conducive to being frugal. The end result was the picture above. Two sweater's worth and a skein of Malabrigo Lace.

"You have a card," he said, but as I made it to the till, mom slipped me his.

No more squirrel!

Nonstop excitement here.

We finally put an end to the squirrel problem. Yesterday dad covered the holes where it was getting in and out with chicken wire. The only problem was that in doing so he accidentally caged it in.

We left it in there overnight, figuring that if it was hungry it would be a lot more willing to leave. This morning it started climbing around at around 8am and later on when I looked out at it, I found it clinging to the chicken wire, its face pressed up against it to get some sun. I took pity on the thing and decided that I would let it out today.

In the early afternoon I began to pry out the staples holding the chicken wire when I suddenly realized that it was sitting two feet away from me, growling. Have you ever heard a squirrel growl? It's the scariest thing in the world when the squirrel is two feet away from your head and you're not wearing goggles, gloves or a bee suit.

I got my sister to whack the ceiling below it scare it to the other end of the roof, but that meant that when I finally got the chicken wire open so that the squirrel could get out, it would not move. She and I tag teamed for a while on squirrel watch to see if maybe it would come out on its own, but two plus hours later, it hadn't moved and we were freezing cold.

We had to burn an entire newspaper to smoke it out. It hopped hesitantly to the open hole and then out across the patio, never to be seen again. It hasn't returned, so it's a good sign that it didn't leave any babies in there. It has, however, eaten all of the electrical wires and filled the space with random junk and feces, so eventually we will have to tear out the ceiling and clean it up.

I've been working on the above sweater for a while now and I've finally made it through the yoke. The pattern is Wheat Ear Cable Yoke from Interweave Knits Summer 2007, modified to be knit in one piece from the top-down. It will be finished just in time for it to be too warm to wear it.