Dance With You

The Cherry On Top

2007-02-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

Know what really brightens up a day after you find out that a month's (and many sleepless nights') worth of work has been undermined by a few page breaks? Having a long, long needle stuck directly into your shoulder joint.

This becomes especially exciting once the anaesthetic wears off.

'Tis the Season (?)

2006-12-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

This is a hilarious time of year in which to be shopping. I'm as much in favour of getting in the Christmas spirit as anyone else, but sometimes I think that companies take Christmas-themed items a bit too far in their quest for the almighty buck. Here are some of the more glaring examples I've come across:

Twisted Sister - A Twisted Christmas. When I think about the holiday season, the words "heavy" and "metal" almost never come to mind (unless, of course, I'm talking either about my body mass after Christmas breakfast - the best breakfast of the whole year - or about the material of the snow shovel I will inevitably spend time with over the break), but Twisted Sister has apparently come out with "one of the best rock 'n' roll Christmas albums period since Elvis made his." Of course, it's on the BF's Christmas list. If he makes me listen to it instead of Christmas with the Chipmunks, there's gonna be hell to pay.
Christmas Cadbury Mini Eggs. Come on, people, they're clearly an Easter candy! Of all the blatant cash-grabs... Now, this is not to say that they're not delicious (because, of course, they are), but I won't eat them on principle. Unless Santa puts some in my stocking. You don't wanna mess with Santa.
Holiday-Themed Lingerie. Ho ho ho, indeed. Yes, that's right, Santa is now some kind of fetish. Nothing says "let's celebrate the birth of Christ" like crotchless panties.

That's all I've got for now. Happy holidays, everyone! Details on the Scotland trip to follow...

Hasty

2006-11-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

Note: I started writing this post 3 weeks ago, but then I got busy. Sorry!

I tend to make decisions quickly. I get excited about something, I spend a couple of seconds considering consequences/implications, and then I dive in. This can backfire occasionally (for example, "of course I need this awesome Hallowe'en costume from the Internet! I will order it immediately! There can be no downside to having a pleather police outfit!"), but I generally look back with no regrets. I hope that my most recent rash decision will likewise turn out to be a good one.

Yesterday afternoon was a perfectly normal one. I was in my PJs, doing some studying, when my best friend in the whole world came online. We started chatting about plans for the Christmas break, and it turned out that she wasn't coming home this year. However, she invited me (as she always does) to come and visit her. And for once, there was absolutely no reason why I couldn't. Before I knew it, I had bought myself a ticket to Scotland to go and visit her for 10 days. Scotland!

I have never been to Europe. I have been many fun and exciting places (most of them tropical), but I thought it was better to save Europe for a time when I could really enjoy it. And with more than 3 weeks off this Christmas and plenty of time to recover from jet lag, I can really enjoy it! Tentative plans so far include:

Helping my best friend (who teaches math and physics at a Catholic high school) chaperone the Christmas dance at her school. I am SO going to walk up to kids who are slow dancing and tell them to "leave room for the Holy Spirit."
Going to London. She's got some kind of hook-up whereby we can stay overnight for free, so we're going to take in the sights, see a musical, and hopefully be chased comically by bobbies with hilarious music in the background.
Night out in Edinburgh. I don't know exactly what this will entail, but I suspect that dancing will be involved. And maybe dressing up. And, as with all nights out with my best friend, some kind of adventure (there's nobody else in the world with whom I would randomly be felt up by a female Kingston stripper, or end up on a goth/industrial Web site).
Christmas shopping. I've done almost nothing on this front - the stuff I pre-ordered for my sisters looks like it's not going to arrive in time, so I have no choice but to find things abroad. Everyone may get kilts. Or fried food of some description.
Trip to Dublin (?). This is still up in the air, but I would like to get a look at Ireland while I'm over there. I would also like to try Guinness in an actual Irish pub.

That's all for now, but I'm sure there will be adventures aplenty! Tell you all about it when I get back!

Sweet Relief

2006-11-13T19:54:00.000-08:00

Today, I came out of practice just in time to see my bus pull up to the bus stop, which was about 100-200 feet away from me. I began to run. The bus pulled away. I kept running. The bus kept driving. I stopped - clearly this was not meant to be. And then, as if by miracle, the bus stopped again! It actually waited for me to get on (thus sparing me the 30-minute wait I would otherwise have had in store), then whooshed me swiftly home. Could this mean that my luck is changing?

Other exciting things today: one of my teammates, a personal trainer, has announced that she needs a "workout buddy", so I get to come and work out with her at her studio twice a week for free. Also, I got my act together and did laundry today (yay for fresh sheets), my group reports are finally starting to come together, and I only have to wait another week and a half 'til Wicked.

Everything's comin' up me!

Nesting

2006-10-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

This week, I have no class. It's midterm week at school, but since I have no midterms, my main job has been sleeping in and getting my group report done. Group report went in yesterday, so now I'm considering tending to another thing that I've been putting off: cleaning. This is always at the very bottom of my "to do" list, but when the alternative is doing the 571 pages of reading that's due next week, I occasionally indulge my gently-reminding roommate with a few minutes of scrubbing and vacuuming.

Today, however, my task is different from my usual cleaning. Today I attack my room.

When I moved in here almost 6 months ago, unpacking was something I told myself I'd finish up "as soon as I had time." However, since I tend to keep my schedule filled to the brim with busy work, my room is in a rather hilarious state right now.

I live in a medium-small room. It would be a pretty nice space if there was enough room to walk around in it, but sadly, it is full of boxes - boxes of clothes and books and knick-knacks and the spoils of long-ago drugstore trips. Hangers litter the floor, and the only space free is a narrow corridor which leads directly to my bed. Wander off the beaten path and I can't guarantee your safety.

Today, however, is the day all of that changes. The hangers and clothes will go away; the laundry will be assembled for washing; the air will ring with my battle cries as I wage war on clutter; and the garbage can will overflow with things I will finally decide that I no longer need.

As soon as I get off the couch.

Driven

2006-10-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

I have spent much time in the past few days going places. Nowhere exciting or worldly (unless you count T-dot, which I guess is both - it just seems less so in comparison to other Tri adventures happening around the globe), but places that involved vehicles. My encounters in these vehicles were mildly interesting (at least, more so than my usual life), so I'll take you through a few of them.

1. Cab to bus station - This guy was one of those rare chatty bus drivers that I actually enjoy talking to (I frequently feel as though I have nothing to add to in-cab conversations, for whatever reason). His wife went to school with me (though I didn't actually know her), and he was thinking of going to law school at UWO next year. Nice guy. So he tells me this story about a fare he had on Friday night. He answered a call, and arrived to find six people wanting to get into his cab. "Sorry," he said, "I can't possibly take that many." His fares grumbled, but a lesser number piled into the car. Upon arriving at the destination, one of these passengers drunkenly demanded that the ride be free (presumably because the cab driver hadn't been willing to take six people). My cabbie, naturally, refused. At this point, the kid says "Look, man, you don't know me - I'm in law school and I'm gonna sue you." Can you believe this?! This is the kind of obnoxious law student that gives the rest of them a bad name. News flash, kid: being a law student doesn't give you the right to just make up law. You have to be an English Court of Appeal judge to do that.

2. Bus to T-Dot - Since this ride happened in the middle of the day, I fully expected the bus to be empty. What I didn't count on was that there was an Iron Maiden concert happening in Toronto that night, which naturally meant that the bus was full of punked-out, black-t-shirt-wearing fans. They all seemed very nice, and were in high spirits, comparing seat locations and favourite songs. My "highlight" of the bus trip was when we arrived in town and the girl behind me said to her boyfriend, "Hey, do you wanna go see Joan Collins and Linda Evans in concert?" and he responded "That depends - will they be stripping?" I never did find out whether his attendance was contingent on them stripping or not stripping, but it's fun to ponder. The Iron Maiden fans' "highlight" of the bus ride seemed to come when one of them stood up to go to the bathroom, wavered a lot in the aisle (nearly fell down, actually), and said "Whoa, man, this is going to be really hard!" (Laughter from all the other concert-goers.) Upon emerging, he exclaimed loudly "Whoa, man, that was really hard!" (More laughter.) Oh, to be young and on drugs...

3. Cab to the Restaurant - My whole reason for being in TO in the first place was to have dinner with my Firm. The file that I had spent half of my summer on finally finished, and the partners were nice enough to invite the students to come out with them. Pretty awesome and thoughtful, eh? This cab ride was more just pleasant than anything else. My cabbie was an older, toque-wearing man with an accent that might have been Russian, and he referred to me throughout the ride as "young lady," which I sometimes find patronizing but in this case just found adorable. He actually spent almost an entire trip trip uptown talking about the weather! He had new snow tires for the cab that he was pretty excited about, and he chattered happily about the blizzard in Buffalo and the long, cold winter we're expecting. I was slightly less happy about this prospect. I think it's because I wasn't wearing a toque.

4. Trip back to the L - My plan had been to take the 1am bus back home after dinner, sleeping the whole way and arriving a little after 3am. The people at dinner had asked how long I was staying, etc., and I told them this. So at the end of the meal, one of the partners turns to me and says "Your limo is here." I thought maybe this was some kind of joke, or that maybe it was code for the bf showing up at the restaurant (which I didn't think he would do; besides, he doesn't have a car). I guess I looked pretty confused, so he repeated himself. I remained confused, so he explained that they hadn't wanted me to take the bus back, so they'd called a limo to drive me back to London. Me = floored. After profuse thanks, I went out to the curb where, sure enough, a uniformed driver was waiting to whisk me away home. The car was big and comfy, with so much leg room I barely knew what to do with it all. There were newspapers and magazines for my reading enjoyment, and a whole bunch of buttons that let me control the radio, the heat, the seat in front of me... I had to restrain myself from just pushing buttons randomly for a few minutes. I finished my cases for the next day of class and had an hour or so of comfy sleep before we whispered into my driveway. Helluva way to end the day.

Thus endeth the tales of my recent adventures in things with wheels. In other news, the varsity season has started up, so I'm full-force into my second big cold (flu?) of the year. Hopefully this time I'll escape sans antibiotics. I've got a whole week with no class to look forward to (it's midterm week and I have no midterms), so I plan to post more. No promises, though - my bed, as it often does, may turn out to be more appealing.

Another Year...

2006-09-28T21:25:00.001-07:00

...another birthday. The quarter-century mark is upon me, and I'm going to celebrate with a swim at the university pool, a few hours of promoting the Firm, and an evening of sitting around. It's going to be very exciting. I might even make Rice Krispie squares.

The past few weeks have been fairly dull (hence the lack of posting). Practices are in full swing, so I'm in the pool 8 times a week; classes are clipping along almost faster than I can keep up with; and most of my friends are halfway across the world. All of this means that I'm mostly either at school or sitting around at home. Not very exciting stuff.

However, today there was a break in the boredom when something incredibly exciting happened: my Elton John tickets arrived. I know you thought I was excited last year when both the Backstreet Boys and Journey rolled through town, but I'm pretty sure this show is going to wipe the floor with both of them, even if the pyrotechnics won't compare to BSB and the drummer-getting-progressively-more-naked won't compare to Journey. I've got pretty awesome floor seats, and Mom is coming down to revel in the EJ love with me. I heart family-friendly entertainment.

This year is putting me into a very weird head-space. When you're living between two faculties and two buildings all the time, there's this weird sense of not really belonging in either place. I go days sometimes without having anything but the most superficial of conversations, and I can't help but feel that a giant hole could open in the ground and swallow me up and it would take an uncomfortably long time for anyone to notice.

But enough of the gloom and doom. I've had a week that was more or less free of work (which means fairly full of sleep), I've got some lovely flowers on my living room table (courtesy of Mom), and I can officially rent a vehicle without anyone hassling about my age. All in all, life is pretty decent.

Over and out.

A Birthday Tribute

2006-09-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Deadpan (to the tune of Barry Manilow's Mandy)

I remember all my life
Raining down as cold as ice
Shadows of a tri
A long night in Chambers, workin' in the night
The night goes into

Morning just another day;
Hilarity's not far away.
Looking in your eyes,
I see a memory, hard not to realize
How happy you make me.

Oh Deadpan,
Well you came, and you gave without taking
And I seduced you with my eyes
Oh Deadpan
There were abs of death that left us both shaking
And I miss you today. Oh Deadpan!

You're taking law in Holland for a while
This pass/fail deal must make you smile
Caught up in a world of uphill climbing,
The tears are in my eyes,
And nothing is rhyming.

Oh Deadpan,
Well we ate chili nachos on tri-dates
But you flew far away.
Oh Deadpan,
Well we had some dance parties... um... pie plates
And I miss you today. Oh, Deadpan!

-- This tribute has been brought to you by WonderSushi: Inducing after-lunch comas since 1986

Moved to Tears

2006-09-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

I am a helpful person. When people ask me for my help with things, I find it exceedingly difficult to say no. This is especially true when I either like the people I'm helping, like the help I'm providing (a good example of this is house painting, to which I am eerily drawn), or both. However, this tendency toward Girl-Guide-y-ness occasionally gets me into lots and lots of trouble.

One week ago, as a favour to my Mom (and my sister), I offered to help move S out of her old apartment in Hamilton and into her new one in Kingston. This was to be accomplished in a one-way trip in a U-Haul, rented a full month in advance. I was to take a train (first class) to Toronto, grab a bus to the Hammer late Wednesday night, and start the move first thing Thursday morning, at which point we were supposed to have a truck.

However, all did not go as planned. I arrived, as scheduled, late Wednesday. Come 2pm Thursday afternoon, there was still no truck in sight. S then proceeded to spend 40 minutes trying to get through on the phone to U-Haul central, who told her to proceed to her closest location for 5pm, where a truck would be provided. Her closest location was, of course, a 20-minute cab ride away. We dutifully arrived at the place at 5 and waited our turn in line. After listening to the manager fight with an angry customer (who had been charged with an extra day's rental for returning her truck 2.5 hours late and claimed she hadn't read the contract she had signed) for 30 minutes or so, our turn arrived. We approached the counter and told them that we had been instructed to show up at 5pm (it was 5:30 at this point) to claim the truck for our one-way move. Their response? "We don't have a truck to give you." "How is this possible," we asked. "We reserved a month ago!" The manager, a weary, beaten-down-looking guy, told us that the only way we could have a truck to go to Kingston was if we promised to have it back for 7 the next morning. That gave us a little over 13 hours to complete the move. Seeing no alternative, we agreed. After all, I had slept until 2 and could probably safely drive all night and then just sleep the next day in the car on the way to the cottage (my only real weekend of relaxation all summer). We agreed to the arrangement.

I slowly (those big trucks take a while to get used to) drove back to S's apartment, and we psyched ourselves up for our all-night drive. We climbed out, went to the back, and pulled out the heavy metal ramp. And out it came - the ramp, missing the latch that holds it into the truck (I think it had rusted off), fell completely out of the truck and onto the street. My big toe was squarely underneath. Sobbing uncontrollably, I made my way (with S's help) back up to her place, where we removed my shoe and sock to inspect the damage. My toe had swollen up so that it barely fit in my runner anymore, and was bleeding profusely. However, now under a tight deadline to get the truck back, we couldn't do much to deal with it at that point. S began loading the truck, and I lay there, crying and trying to will the pain away enough that I would be able to drive for 12 hours.

With some help from a friend of S's (who was actually a professional mover and just happened to be passing by), she finally got the truck loaded. (It should here be noted that he considered the ramp highly hazardous, too - there were no instructions or warnings, and he almost annihilated his own feet on it.) In the meantime, her landlord had come to do some aura healing on my toe - probably not hugely helpful, but it did calm me down, and the pain subsided enough to allow me to hobble down to the truck. Off we went.

What followed was 5-6 hours of pure hell, as the highway we were on was reduced by 1 or 2 lanes in at least 2 or 3 places. I actually had to park the truck at one point for about 5 minutes, and the whole drive was probably at least an hour and a half longer than it would have been without the traffic.

We finally arrived in Kingston at 2am, with only about an hour to unload the truck and get back on the road. Under those kinds of time constraints, there was no way that S had the time to do even just the lighter boxes and furniture by herself. This meant that I had to help, repeatedly hobbling in and out of the truck, around the brutal obstacle course in her backyard, and up the stairs into her apartment while minimizing the amount of weight I was putting on my poor, damaged foot. A word on this obstacle course: first of all, there was only one light in the whole backyard. It was one of those sensor-activated lights, so it kept shutting off if we were inside for too long. This created problems, because while it was on, this lamp illuminated the most challenging part of the trip into the apartment: the large tree, tree stump with raised roots, 4-inch-thick hose, and three ladders (which were chained in place and couldn't be moved) around and over which one had to manoeuver in order to even reach the porch stairs. After about 14 trips through this minefield of swollen-and-bleeding-toe pain, I came out into the backyard to find a skunk staring at me from a distance of about 20 feet. I froze, silently willing it to go away, and after a minute it ambled back into the bushes.

After some scary moments with a heavy desk (on which S lost her grip when she was halfway up the stairs, leaving me with the entire weight of the thing on my chest and only one leg with which to hold it up), we were back on the road. At this point, I noticed that my toe had bled not only through my sock, but also through my shoe. Going as fast as the huge truck (not to mention its crappy steering and suspension) could manage, we made it back to the Hammer and had the truck back (and full of diesel) with 5 minutes to spare. After showing the ramp problem to the employee on duty (a bald gentleman with a tattoo) and getting his acknowledgement that the ramp was clearly broken (his exact words were "Oh my God, that should not have happened - I'm so sorry"), we headed to Hamilton emerg, where I got an x-ray confirming that my toe was broken, a hole drilled painfully (with some kind of hot needle) into my toenail to release the pressure, a bottle of Tylenol 3s for the pain, and a shiny new pair of crutches.

My weekend of rest was spent primarily sitting/lying down and willing the codeine-induced nausea to go away, and my first week of school has been a painful ordeal of ironically relying on everyone I know for help (thanks for the groceries and DC, Drew, and for the rides to school, D). Needless to say, my training is going to be somewhat limited for the next few weeks as I can't do anything that might risk me kicking something (which is pretty much my whole sport), and it's risky for me to use my left leg when swimming. I feel like a human tripod.

Anyway, this post has been long and dramatic enough, and I've got cases to crack for tomorrow.

Send healing thoughts.

One Classy Lady

2006-08-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm back!

This blog entry is brought to you courtesy of Via First Class, which now comes equipped with high-speed Internet at the low, low price of $8.99/24-hour period. Yes, I am so important that I require online access at all times. Why, without Internet access, how could I possibly engage in the terribly important business of getting caught up on other people's blog entries and chatting on MSN? The entire legal and/or financial world could fall apart in my electronic absence! All around me are businesspeople in suits, their keyboards chattering away importantly. Maybe the suits are just a sham, and they're all blogging too...

Anyway, the summer is finally over (more or less), and I have managed to go nearly 4 months with no real vacation to speak of; all other opportunities for rest seem to have been taken up with appointments, commitments, and general strife. However, I have faith that this weekend, in Bobcaygeon, I'll see the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time. At the very least, I should have a few days of lake-side fun to take my mind off of my messy, messy life.

Unrelated tangent:

I have recently become concerned with a certain practice common to many fast food and coffee establishments. While in a Starbucks restroom several weeks ago, I saw a sign I had seen many times before: Employees must wash hands before returning to work. I always find this sign slightly disconcerting. The way I see it, it could have two possible purposes:

It is meant to reassure patrons of the establishment that they're not being served by people with germy hands.
It is supposed to serve as a reminder to employees.

Either of these possibilities is completely unacceptable to me. If such signs are meant as a reassurance, that implies that I would be patronizing some kind of food- or beverage-related establishment where I wasn't quite sure that employees were really washing their hands. If I'm willing to roll the dice that way on cleanliness, then I probably don't need the reassurance. If, on the other hand, it's a reminder to the employees, then I have to wonder what kind of employees this place is hiring in the first place. This kind of reminder is only going to worry me that the people that are in contact with my food are the kind of people who need a reminder that washing your hands after a trip to the restroom is a good idea. Personally, I would probably feel better if they just didn't put the signs up at all.

(Side note: an interesting variation of this sign is the one that has illustrated instructions on how to wash your hands properly. "Oh, I rinse them after I soap them up? My God, this information has changed my whole technique!")

End of tangent.

I'm going to try to make a new-semester resolution to post more often. Not because I think my life is likely to be much more interesting this year, but because it's probably the easiest way to keep Deadpan and Femme-Rage feeling like they're right here, basking in the Tri-love.

Zooming toward Toronto,
Try-Hard

Unwatched, Uncensored

2006-07-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

It's almost August. Can you believe it? That probably makes nearly three months with no posting whatsoever. It's not because I didn't want to, or even that I didn't have time to (for those of you who know where I'm currently working, that latter point might come as a surprise). I'm just woefully lacking in Internet access. I have it at work, of course, but I have a sneaking suspicion that everything that I do electronically is monitored there, so I have opted to keep my Internet usage to a minimum - the CBC Web site, my personal email account, and "Go Fug Yourself", which I access only from my BlackBerry. Yes, my BlackBerry. Every time it buzzes, a little piece of my soul disappears... I'll stop in mid-conversation... I'll check the screen quickly, "just to make sure it's not something urgent" (it sometimes is, for the record), and then I'll return to my conversation and what used to be my life.

Not that I'm complaining. This summer has been incredible so far. My head is fairly exploding with all of the new things that I've learned, and to see the fruits of your labours actually put to good use (as opposed to being put in the "round file") is endlessly fulfilling. No, this is not sarcastic - the Try-Hard in me is happy.

However, the athletic part of me is suffering. When you're forever "on call", your time is not your own, and sometimes, when you want nothing more than to go work out, you instead have to sit at your desk waiting for the phone to ring. This is the worst-case scenario. Other times you really are just busting your ass until 1 or 2 am, trying to meet the latest impossible deadline. Either way, though, life does not allow for 4 hours' worth of gym time every night. With any luck, once I'm no longer a student I'll be able to pick my own escape times and just make up the work when I'm damn well done training. But for now, I sit.

However, as previously mentioned, there has been much learning so far this summer (both in the office and outside of it). Among the more memorable learning points were:

When your roommate offers to leave you his custom-built, sentimentally valuable couch after he moves out, be very suspicious. He's probably doing it because the couch doesn't fit in the elevator and will have to be moved out via 16 flights of stairs.
If the room in the house where you're staying is tiny and airless, with nary a breeze to be found through the lone window (possibly because the window opens onto a two-foot-wide alleyway), get a fan. Or just don't ever leave your air conditioned office building.
All-nighters: they're not just for undergrad procrastination anymore. 26 is a reasonable number of consecutive hours to have to work.
When you first start wearing suits every day, you will probably feel like you are playing dress-up in someone else's clothing. Any novelty that attaches to this will wear off very, very quickly.
The chest pains are perfectly normal. Lay off the Diet Coke, will ya?
The lurching of any TTC vehicle (resulting in you, a passenger, being thrown forward or backward) is intentional. They are, in fact, trying to make your ride as uncomfortable as possible.
Having coleslaw available at Thursday lunches might actually give you something to look forward to. Yes, that's right. Coleslaw.
If, one tired evening, you are too slow to grab back onto the handrail in the streetcar (which you let go of to let an old man get out the door), it's entirely possible that when you fall straight over backward in your suit and stilettos, a whole bunch of people standing a considerable way back from you will lurch forward to catch you. Thank you, Toronto streetcar patrons.
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
When taking off your heels at night actually sends a physical shudder of pleasure through your body, you might need some new shoes. With slightly lower heels. And slightly less-pointy toes.
You are no good at golf. And by "you are", I mean "I am".
It's past my bedtime.

So there's the update, more or less. I could probably sum up my last few months by saying "I spend a lot of time in the office. Toronto is beautiful in the summer. Or so I've heard."

See you in September.

Survey

2006-04-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

All right folks, classes and exams are over, which means that once I hand in the written assignment from which I am currently procrastinating, I am free for the summer! As previously discussed, I was recently successful in selling my soul to downtown Toronto for the purposes of summer employment. However, as I was discussing with Femme-Rage last night on our Antonio Banderas date (inner-city kids are so inspiring when they learn how to dance), I'd like to know, for matters of historical reference, when the selling of the soul actually took (or actually will take) place. Was it:

When I accepted the job?

When I signed a contract that said I accepted the job?

When I get my first paycheque?

When I first start to work, thus earning money toward my first paycheque?

Basically, is this contractual soul-selling? Accrual soul-selling? Cash-based soul-selling? Or maybe I could use some sort of agricultural method and farm out my soul, one plot at a time?

What do you think? How should the selling of my soul proceed?

ADD – It’s Not Just for 12-Year-Old Boys Anymore

2006-04-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

I hate this time of year. Not just because of the weather, which fluctuates so much between temperate and freezing that it makes me sick, and not just because of the end-of-year push that sees me buried under 30 tonnes of schoolwork. It’s my total lack of focus.

Class discussions that used to leave me wondering, at the end of 80 minutes, where the time had gone now find me looking at the clock every 30 seconds, playing Windows-based card games, and seriously wondering whether it would be possible to nap with my eyes open. Forgive me, but I don’t think I’ll be able to talk about any one subject for more than a paragraph or so.

It started snowing yesterday, after weeks of warm weather. Result? A nasty head cold. This is no fun under any circumstances, but when there are assignments to be done, exams to be studied for, and pre-tournament practices to be attended, the result is sheer misery. And as though it weren’t enough that my ears and nose are blocked and my throat is hoarse, I forgot my glasses today. The word “senseless” comes to mind, except that I can still touch things.

I think that class discussions would be a lot more interesting if everyone had his/her own puppet. And instead of contributing to the discussion in your normal voice, you should have to make your point using your puppet. And your puppet should have to have some kind of interesting voice. And maybe an accent.

People have really tapered off in their class attendance. Looking around the room, there are at least 8 people missing. For the first 6-7 months of the year, we had all 60+ members of our section in class every single day. Apparently the novelty of this program is wearing thin. Or maybe everyone else is sick, too, and they’re just too smart to come in.

Winter makes me feel gross. I have to stay indoors most of the time, which leads to a sloth-like lack of exercise and often frightening over-eating. Not at the same level as those girls who sued McDonald’s or anything, but my intake of grossness definitely increases. For example, sometimes I’ll have a donut as my morning snack instead of yogurt. Nightly gelatin-based candies are fairly common, too. It’s like the sugar is my substitute for sunlight.

I’m in a tax class, which is incredibly boring at the best of times. However, in the state I’m in today, all I want to do is fall asleep… I’m actually looking forward to class ending just so I can go downstairs and sleep in the computer lab. My life rules. Oops! Dozed off for a few seconds there, but awoke again when I heard the words “For those of you studying law…” I knew that people in the class would immediately look in my direction, and it’s not a very stealthy nap if everyone can see you. My professor in this class is pretty awesome, in spite of the subject matter. He’s really excited about tax, the effect of which is exaggerated by the fact that he has serious difficulty modulating the volume of his voice. Highly entertaining, especially when accompanied by the loud, gleeful laugh he lets rip at random intervals.

Interval training is definitely something I need to get back into. It’s great because you get the hard work of a regular workout without needing the endurance. Definitely good for where I’m at right now.

I have an exam tomorrow. It's scary. Maybe this would be a good time to study. I'll be back soon, I promise. And maybe I'll even stay on track...

Then again, maybe I won't.

Huzzah!

2006-03-26T16:45:00.000-08:00

Found it!!! It was under the couch. *Sigh of relief*

Missing: One Small Piece of my Soul

2006-03-26T16:21:00.000-08:00

This has been a weekend full of loss. After spending Friday night looking after my very drunk boyfriend (it was his birthday, and his friends remembered), I returned to my apartment to find that my roommate, who recently moved out to take a job in Toronto, had returned in the night to reclaim the things that were his. These things included:

The TV
All TV-type accessories
All of the pots and many of the pans
Every non-plastic piece of cutlery in the place
The f-ing garbage can

I realize that these things were his. I realize that he was within his rights to reclaim them. However, a little bit of a warning would have been nice. Just so I could stock up on enough plastic stuff from school to not have to panic about breaking the one remaining knife on my overdone chicken and having to resort to tearing off chunks of meat with my teeth and nails... How low I have sunk.

To make matters sadder, I returned from rugby today and realized that a little piece of my soul was missing. Yes, that's right, somewhere between practice and home, I lost my iron ring. I know it's replaceable (I've already contacted the secretary of Camp #3), but that ring represented four years of my blood, sweat, and tears. Yes, all of those things. And this new one won't be coming to me in a special secret ceremony with hymns and anvil-banging; it will come in the mail. In a sad little brown envelope, probably. And whereas the first one was priceless - the culmination of my entire engineering career to that point - this new one will come with a price tag of $35. Kind of pathetic, isn't it?

My pinkie feels so lonely...

From Triumph to Tragedy

2006-03-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I finally won another coffee in Roll Up the Rim to Win. I no longer envision grandiose plots by Tim Horton's executives to force me to pay the full price for everything I get from their establishments, and I'm once again at peace with my win record. Now, if I could just win a donut... (It has recently come to my attention that the fritter is, in fact, the king of donuts, and I crave them on a regular basis. It's all part of my magical journey to obesity, fuelled by the mono-induced sloth.)

In other news, I just happened upon the most awful (and also, in a sick, twisted way, the best) news article title I've come across in recent memory: Friendly killer whale sucked into tugboat's propeller. I mean, the image is awful enough, but when you put "friendly" at the beginning of it, it takes on an almost ironic contrast to the rest of the title. Stop tugging at my heartstrings, CBC! Stop it immediately! Apparently this killer whale had a reputation for coming out and trying to play with the boats around Vancouver Island. "Luna loved playing with boats of any kind and seemed able to keep safe." Until he met propellor-induced death, you mean. You bastards.

Testing my skills... and my patience...

2006-03-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

As I, for the umpteenth time this week, lowered my losing Roll-Up-The-Rim-To-Win cup from Timmy's, I started to feel discouraged. I don't ask much, Tim Horton's. I don't need the car (though it would help me pay down some frighteningly large debt), I don't need the plasma TV (I'd rarely be home to watch it), and I definitely don't need the barbecue (I can cook meat on my stove). But come on, is a lousy donut or a coffee too much to ask? Just so I can feel like a winner?

Anyway, I decided to check out the fine print, just to see what the odds were on this magnificently disappointing contest. Know what I found out? You're supposed to have to answer a skill-testing question to claim a prize. I have problems understanding the logic behind this requirement. I could understand if they wanted to ensure that you were smart enough to operate a barbecue, but do you really need to be able to do math to drink a coffee? I would argue that if you're smart enough to find your way to a Tim Horton's location, find your way to the counter, present an employee with your winning rim, and say "double double", you probably have the competence required to drink the coffee.

Also, whoever said that a mathematical skill-testing question was the fairest way to assess "skill"? Why not verb conjugation? Or juggling? Both are skills... why are they less valid for the purpose of claiming prizes? And if you're going to demand math skills, maybe it should be a bit more complicated. Laplace transforms, anyone?

Waving the White Flag

2006-02-28T15:27:00.000-08:00

I'll admit defeat. In spite of my best efforts, my body has spent the last month or so kicking my ass (hence the lack of posting). What seemed to be a simple round of tonsilitis turned into two. And then into mono. Yes, I got the infamous kissing disease.

I could tell you about the fever, the chills, the exhaustion, the two near-faintings, and the total inability to speak or to swallow anything but milk for a whole week, but that's all pretty boring. And depressing. What's really fun about this story is that in the midst of the mono, I got to do recruitment week for first-year law students.

For those of you who haven't done it, TO recruitment week consists of running around from firm to firm, meeting and collecting business cards from as many people as humanly possible (not to mention remembering their names and practice groups in case of future encounters), and networking your way through receptions and multiple meals with partners and associates. All very fun and exciting. Except for the mono.

I'm sure you can imagine how hard it is to be "on" for over 12 hours a day for 3 days. Now imagine doing it when walking more than a block at a time causes you to have to pause for breath and to wish, with every fibre of your being, that you could just lie down where you are and take a nap... Horrifying. Managed to almost totally suck the fun out of the week. If it wasn't for the landing of a sweet sweet job with an awesome awesome firm (yes, the second "sweet" is merited, as is the second "awesome"), I might have said that the badness from the week almost outweighed the goodness...

So that's the big update. Apologies for the lack of postage, but under the circumstances, I'm sure you understand. More soon, I promise.

A Plea

2006-02-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Mischa Barton,

Please go and eat a sandwich. Do it right now. Seeing that many of your ribs from the back? Scary.

Regards,
Try-Hard

Rebellion

2006-01-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

After days and weeks of overexertion, overexhaustion, and a total lack of sleep, my body has risen up against me and seems to be determined, once and for all, to send me a message: sleep already!

My glands are swollen. Even the lightest touch of my neck sends pain radiating up toward the top of my skull. Each time I swallow I become more and more aware of the raw, raggedy mess my tonsils have become. The pain has even started to push its way into my ears. The whole scene is eerily familiar, hearkening back to earlier instances of brutally painful strep throat.

All of this is leading me to believe that a good night's sleep won't make this go away. Which is good, because I probably won't get a good night's sleep anyway.

But I'm not going to take this insolence lying down - oh no! I've begun my fight against the upstart toxins with a heavy shelling of tea with honey and a side of frozen yogurt. And I won't stop there. Tomorrow will find me at the campus clinic, in the hopes of securing some sort of drug that will kick the bad out of my system and make my body straighten up and fly right. If it doesn't... well... let's just say that in a fight between me and my body, you can bet on me just about every time.

*Knuckles crack threateningly*

Dislikes

2006-01-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

I promised this post months ago (in the original "Getting to know you" post), and I think it's time I made good on that promise. Now, please understand that I'm not necessarily judging anyone or anything in this list as "bad"; if you're a fan of any of these things or people, more power to you. Except, of course, that we won't be able to be friends anymore. (Jokes)

So, without any further ado, here are a few of my dislikes:

Raymond. Yes, the star of Everybody Loves Raymond. Everybody does not love Raymond. I hate Raymond.
Frozen peas. These are okay if you're using them to ice an injury, but if you have to eat vegetables, these should be at the bottom of your list. They're mushy and unpleasant and they make me gag.
The clarinet. Sorry about this one. I am a music fan, but having been in a high school band for a number of years, I know the havoc that this instrument can wreak when it's not played well. The squeaking reeds alone are enough to make you want someone to drag their fingernails down a chalkboard just to drown out the sound. At least fingernails on a chalkboard make no pretense that they're making music... But seriously, if you're looking for a clarinet-y sound, why not go for the oboe? I think the oboe will do the job nicely, and it's such a soothing instrument.
Bus seats. As much as I enjoy bus trips, the seats on buses are not designed for me. In fact, I might name them as the least-ergonomic pieces of furniture on the planet. If I'm sitting in them properly, they actually force my shoulders forward and put a curvature in my spine, essentially putting me in a hunchback position for the duration of the trip. My back is still screaming from yesterday's trip back from T-dot.
People who say "supposably". There is no such word as "supposably". The word you're looking for is "supposedly."
Phonies. "Wait a second! Something's not right here. You were just making it look like you were playing. You're a phony! This guy's a great big phony. You're a great big phony. You know that? That's right! You're a big, fat phony!"
People who refuse to do things because they're popular. Granted, some trends are meant to be ignored (a prime example of such a trend is Ugg boots), but things like Harry Potter are popular for a reason: because they're really good. And here's the thing: refusing to do things just because they're popular is every bit as sheep-like as doing them just because they're popular.
People who give their children cruel names. Examples of this are "Apple", "Kalel", and any female name inappropriately ending in "ie".
People who say "irregardless". I don't care what www.dictionary.com says - this is a garbage, made-up word, and a double negative. That doesn't mean I'm necessarily against all double negatives (I have no problem, for example, with something like "I'm not not licking toads..."); this one, however, has no redeeming hilarious value. All it does is cause a whooshing sensation to come over me.

There you have it - a token selection of things that blind me with rage. Or, at the very least, things that mildly annoy me.

What are your dislikes?

Pinging

2006-01-15T19:29:00.000-08:00

I just came back from rugby practice, and my muscles are singing with delight. Dry-land exercise affects me in a way that its aquatic counterpart never could. I can feel it in my muscles for hours afterward, and not just in that dull, achy way. There are distinctive pings running through my whole body, and it feels fabulous.

Ping.

This week has gone by in a blur of work, inexplicable drama, and the muscle pain that comes from returning to training after weeks of sloth, and it's nice to sit down and just breathe for a few minutes. I've spent much of the last week preparing myself, in earnest, to sell my soul to Bay Street, and with the application deadline right around the corner, the late nights are starting to catch up to me. Perhaps that's why reality hit me so hard this afternoon: this summer is the beginning of what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.

Ping.

I'm no longer going to be doing something "just for the summer"; I'm going to be seriously considering, from now on, whether what I'm doing is something I could actually do forever. Gone are the days when I wore hoodies and pyjama pants to class; I often find myself now in a suit and stilettos. I can't help but feel like a kid playing dress-up in her mom's clothes sometimes...

Ping.

Right now I'm going to eat my dinner of re-heated meat, have a little bit of DC, and buckle down to do some cases and write some cover letters, possibly accompanied by trashy teen TV. No rest for the weary...

Ping.

A Love Letter

2006-01-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

Oh my dearest,

You call me nightly, yet we can never meet
Your siren song beckons me to bed
But powerful forces stand between us:
Case preparation and fear of failure

And so we must remain apart
But when we meet again
Our reunion will be all the sweeter.

Oh Sleep, how I long for thee.

Art and the Big City

2005-12-30T19:58:00.000-08:00

I can't remember the last time my feet have been this sore.

I'm currently in NYC visiting my older sister, and today was a hectic day of soaking up the city's culture in only 7 hours (the morning was occupied by helping S with statistical analysis for her big poster presentation). On our agenda were the Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). Including travelling from place to place, we must have walked at least 10km and climbed about 15 flights of stairs.

But it was worth every step.

Allow me to elaborate. Although I don't pretend to be a culture vulture, there is something about a good art collection that... well, affects me somehow. At the MOMA, I got to see Warhol's soup cans, Dali's melting clocks, Monet's water lilies (they filled a whole room!), and Van Gogh's version of a starry night, among many, many others. Everywhere I looked, things were bursting with colours and patterns and textures - it was as though everything I love about art had been put into a single building... I couldn't move my eyes fast enough to take it all in. I wanted to stay there for weeks; I wanted to drink in all of the colour and the life and let it slowly trickle into me and restore my strength for the upcoming term. I wished desperately that I might see the world through an impressionist's eyes - I would save that power for a dreary day, and then let my imagination turn the monochrome school landscape into an abundance of blues, greens, yellows, and oranges...

Although months could have been spent at the Met alone, we limited ourselves to two hours and a single exhibit: the Van Gogh drawings. I never knew that so much could be done with black and white alone. Country gardens came alive with tangles of thriving blossoms, clouds threatened to open themselves on the landscape beneath, and people expressed such simple emotions as pride, despair, and weariness - all with varying strokes of pencil and ink. Some were made of bold lines, some of playful curlicues; others comprised staccato arches or elegant waves. By the time we reached the paintings, my heart and mind were full to bursting. Adding colour to everything I had already seen was just too much to take in... I had to purchase four different posters just so I could keep staring on my own time.

The interesting thing about art exhibits is that everyone is suddenly a self-proclaimed expert, speaking with ease about pointillism and various charcoal techniques. If you accept that art affects everyone differently, and speaks to everyone in varying ways, then I guess everyone is an expert - every person is entitled to express why a piece of work speaks to him or why it fails to do so. Some can express this better than others. I make no pretense of having the understanding or the vocabulary to do this effectively. When I see a painting that speaks to me, it's like a punch in the stomach: for a brief moment, the wind is knocked out of me and all of the ambient noise is dulled, somehow. I won't usually be able to tell you why, but I'll know that it's special. Today, I saw dozens of such paintings. I have never been so floored by art exhibits in my life.

Tomorrow is our Broadway day (as we satisfied our consumer urges yesterday). Better get a good night's sleep! Sweet dreams, everyone. I'm hoping mine will be filled with colourful post-impressionist landscapes...

The Festivities Continue

2005-12-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

In spite of my best intentions to wake up early and actually get things done today, my body opted to have me stay in bed until almost noon. Sleepy and almost well-rested, I padded out of my room and nearly stumbled over an enormous pile of coloured paper, ribbons, adhesive tags, and festive gift bags. Armed with scissors and some scotch tape, my mom had resolved to take care of all of the Christmas wrapping in one flurry of measuring, cutting, and taping, and she seemed to be using the upstairs hallway as some sort of command central. I decided it was best to stay out of her way, and after a quick breakfast, retreated to my room to do some wrapping of my own. I decided this year to get each member of my family a few smaller things (books, mostly), and to wrap them separately - it's so much fun to open presents on Christmas morning, and I wanted to triple everyone's unwrapping fun :) However, this also meant about 90 minutes' worth of wrapping for just four people. Fortunately, I'm a compulsive paper-folder, so the time just flew by, and before long all of my days of careful shopping had been reduced to a small pile of brightly coloured packages under the tree.

Then came the decorating of the tree. This is always a particularly nice aspect of Christmas, because it's a chance to slip back into memories of hanging the same ornaments as kids... It's funny how seeing a familiar ornament can evoke all of those same feelings of excitement, anticipation, and that sort of undefined and unattributed warmth that I used to feel around Christmas but which have sort of faded through the years...

My little sister (Let's just call her "S", okay? This is getting to be ridiculous), however, has a whole different tradition when it comes to the tree. Instead of ornaments, she hangs business cards. Delightfully eccentric, no? This all started about five or six years ago, when we went out for a family dinner. The restaurant we were in had one of those racks of local business cards, and on the way out of the restaurant, S picked one up that she particularly liked - it belonged to a chimneysweep that operated out of a suburb about 40 minutes from our house. That year, she put the business card on our Christmas tree, and it's been on every year since. As the years passed, however, she gradually began amassing a much larger collection - she'd take any especially pretty ones she saw, and she was sure to get one from anyone she knew. Each year, it was a big surprise: which cards were going to "make" the tree this year? Eventually, she stopped hanging ornaments altogether, and would only put up business cards...

But this year, tragedy struck: she forgot to pack her business card collection. On top of the rough time she's been having, I'm sure you can imagine that this oversight could very well have ruined Christmas for her. Fortunately, I was on the case: instead of having coffee with my ex yesterday, I dragged him around the city for four hours in search of cards from all of her favourite hangouts (hey, he was warned!). The pièce de résistance, however, was the chimneysweep card; having seen it on the tree for so many years, I remembered the name of the place it came from, and we dutifully trekked out there yesterday to retrieve a card. The business, as it turned out, was family-owned, and was run out of the family's home. The owner (and then his mother) listened to the whole story attentively, and then gave us the card with no more questions asked. I wondered briefly how it must feel to be that man, knowing that your random business card could actually bring a smile to someone's face on Christmas...

So the time came to decorate the tree, and we all lugged up our individual boxes from the basement. My parents long ago started the tradition of giving us each a new ornament or two every year with the intention that by the time we moved out, we'd each have tons of ornaments to hang on our own trees. This tradition makes for a fairly eclectic-looking tree, dotted with the handmade ornaments that we made ourselves and that were given to us by neighbourhood kids we used to babysit, but that mess of a tree is one of my favourite things about our house this time of year... We all sat down in the living room, with our boxes in front of us, and I asked S if she'd like to be the first to put something on the tree. She had been dejectedly rooting through her own box, trying to put on a brave face for the family, and she glanced over at me. Then she caught a glimpse of the card in my outstretched hand - the chimneysweep card.

I haven't seen her smile that widely in months.

We'll all head to church in a few hours, and then return home for the traditional Christmas Eve lasagna (to be followed, much later, by the traditional Christmas Eve pizza, to satisfy my older sister's cravings for Pizza Pizza brought on by four years of living in the US). We'll hang the stockings, maybe watch It's a Wonderful Life (I heart Jimmy Stewart!), and then read the three traditional Christmas Eve books: The Littlest Angel (read by me), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (read by S), and The Night Before Christmas (read by my older sister).

Just one more sleep 'til Christmas! If I don't manage to post tomorrow, best wishes to all of you. This has always been my favourite time of year...

The Gift of Deliciousness

2005-12-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, my younger sister decided that rather than buying all of her friends gifts, she would make them instead. One of our family traditions has always been the baking of massive amounts of Christmas goodies (mostly to be brought to office parties and Christmas parties, and to be put out when company comes), so this was a natural gift choice for her - the infrastructure was already in place, so to speak. It should here be noted that the reason she liked baked goods as a gift idea was probably primarily that a) they don't have to be customized (i.e., they're pretty generic), and b) they're cheap - my parents buy the ingredients for her.

However, in order to accommodate the surprisingly large number of "close" friends she has, we have had to seriously scale up our cookie-baking operation, and compress it down to a day or two (as it occupies the whole kitchen). Also, she clearly cannot handle this undertaking alone. My mom digs out the recipes and makes the homemade Skor bars, my dad makes the cookie dough and cleans up after the whole operation, I make the holiday Rice Krispie squares with the licorice bows around them and do various mixing and baking jobs throughout, and little sis cuts out the cookies, bakes them, and oversees everything. Oh, and everyone frosts. Let me tell you, that kid is a real slave driver. It's not enough to just get frosting on the cookies - oh no - you have to have different colours of icing on the cookie depending on what shape it is (Santa, for example, must have a red hat with white trim, a red suit, and brown boots and toy sack). We end up with three or four different colours going at once, HUNDREDS of these cookies to get through, and my little sister yelling directions at us throughout. "What are you, crazy?! The Christmas trees can't be yellow! They have to be green! And their stems have to be brown! I don't care how long it takes! We're going for realism, here!" By the time we finish, there's icing sugar and frosting from one end of the kitchen to the other, and every surface in our downstairs is covered with drying cookies.

But God help you if you eat one of those cookies. One of the unintended effects of this relatively new manifestation of my sister's generosity is that all cookies must now be given away to her friends. No snacking (unless the cookie is burned or generally deemed unfit for her friends' consumption); no sharing with company (they get the store-bought ones); and certainly none for Christmas parties. Basically, she's taken this part of Christmas and delivered it to all of her friends at the expense of everyone we know. And as much as I enjoy seeing the delighted look on her face as she gives her friends their Christmas treats, I think next year I'll suggest that she do the tried-and-true generic gift: Body Shop gift baskets.

By the way, today I may have saved Christmas for someone. More on that tomorrow.

Mmmm... tradition...

2005-12-21T20:41:00.000-08:00

Christmas traditions - everyone's got 'em. (Except, of course, for those who don't celebrate Christmas.) I think I can safely say that Christmas officially got underway at our place today: Dad and I went on our annual Christmas tree hunt, and my little sis began the nightmare that is the making of her friends' Christmas presents.

First, the Christmas tree. I'm not sure when this started being just Dad and I, but it's been that way for at least the last 5 years. I suspect that a lot of the traditions we had when we were kids are now only maintained for my benefit; my sisters really only care about the food aspects of our family tradition (in spite of what their physiques would suggest), so I'm kind of like the little kid for whom everyone is keeping it together. (True story: my little sister stopped believing in Santa before I did.)

So the first step to getting a tree is to put on the appropriate clothing. It's important to wear boots, as well as clothes you don't care too much about (the sap might be running, and if you get that stuff on your good clothes it will just ruin your whole day, let me tell you). Gloves are also very important here. If you wear woolen ones, you might end up accidentally stabbing yourself with pine needles, which can be a disaster. Now you're all ready to go. We always start by driving to the place closest to our house that sells trees - this is the local tennis and lawn bowling club. Why they sell trees I don't know. It's only for a few weeks each year, and I think it's for charity. In any case, their trees are always sub-par. They're too short, they're the wrong kind, and the branches are flimsy. While we're on the subject, here's what we look for in a good Christmas tree:

Symmetry. No tree is perfect, but the closer you can get to a symmetric tree, the better. If there are weird, scrawny bits (and there almost always are), then try to make sure they're all on the same side so they can face the corner of the room where nobody will see them. It's okay. I won't tell.
Type. Not all trees are created equal. Some of them will drop their needles too early; some of them are less fragrant; some of them are just generally flimsy; some of them look wrong as Christmas trees. Our personal preference is the balsam fir. Smells great and lasts for weeks.
Branches. These need to be strong enough to withstand your heaviest ornaments. As a precautionary measure, though, you should hang the more fragile heavy ones closer to the bottom - that way they don't have as far to fall. There should also be a lot of them. Ornaments get lonely if they're left off the tree for lack of space.
Height. You'd be surprised at how much of a difference this makes. If it's too tall, it either won't fit in your living room or you won't be able to get the star on top. If it's too short, it can either look cute or just sad. This is a very fine line, folks.

As per tradition, I told my dad that the trees at the tennis club looked pretty scrawny and pathetic this year. And as per tradition, he insisted that we drive by anyway. Thankfully, he left out the part of the tradition where he makes me actually get out of the car and go through the motions of looking at all of the trees before declaring them unsuitable. So we proceeded to our next destination - the YMCA. As usual, the trees were lovely (though a little bit shorter than usual; I knew we had left the tree hunt too long...), and we selected a nice fat-looking one with lots of good hanging branches. It went into the car with relatively little fuss, and before too long we had it standing in our living room. There was, of course, the obligatory fight with the Christmas tree stand, which inevitably turns into a fight between my dad and whoever is helping him. Our stand is very finnicky, and requires the tree to be centred on a spike in the middle, then locked into place by three long bolts that are tightened from the outside. Centring the tree on this spike is an absolute joke - with the tree looming overhead, it's almost impossible to even see inside the damn stand (especially with pine needles poking you in the eyes), let alone to perfectly centre something on a small spike in the middle. You have to just look at how much space there is between the trunk and the sides of the stand, and this estimation technique can be totally thrown off if my dad (the one holding the tree) lets the tree lean too much to one side. A typical conversation is:

Dad: "Is it centred?"
Me (or anyone else): "I don't know..."
Dad: "What do you mean you don't know? It's either centred or it's not!"
Me: "It's kind of hard to see down here."
Dad: "Do you need me to move it?"
Me: "I don't kn..."
Dad: "YES OR NO?! I'm HOLDING THE GODDAMNED TREE HERE!"
Me: "Sure. Okay. Move it a bit to the right."
Dad: *grunting* "Is that okay?"
Me: "A bit too far..."
Dad: "DAMMIT, GET THIS RIGHT! I CAN'T HOLD THIS THING FOREVER!"

This repeats for as long as it takes to get the damn thing upright, with my dad becoming increasingly (and comically) agitated as the scene progresses. The whole thing would make for a heartwarming Christmas special, I'm sure.

I was going to write about my little sister and her annual Christmas presents, but I'm pretty tired. More on that tomorrow.

Misery loves company

2005-12-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

The past few weeks seemed to be a whirlwind of stress - exams, all-nighters, and countless bottles of Diet Coke are the things I'll remember most vividly about this time of year, I think. The feeling of clawing desperately to keep hold of consciousness when your mind is trying to drop out from under you; the stale taste in your mouth after you have your third coffee of the day; the bone-aching weariness that makes you feel like you're not so much walking as coaxing your body, step by step, to keep moving; the eerie, cold numbness in your fingers in the last hour of an exam when you've been typing so furiously for so long that the circulation is gone and everything from the wrist down feels cold even in the warmest of rooms... And then, the stress lifted, the elation set in, and for a few hours, I felt totally alive and excited to be out celebrating with these people who have been suffering with me for the last three and a half months. Inevitably, of course, the evening started to wind down, and the realization dawned on me that all of these people were going home with their wives and husbands, relieved to be away from school for a while. And that I would be going home alone. And that maybe I'm nothing more in their lives than an amusing story to tell their families when they go home for vacation...

But I digress. In a surreal sort of daze, I haphazardly threw all of the things I "needed" into a few suitcases and headed to TO to meet up with my mom and my little sister for a few days of shopping and general relaxation. Well, there was about a day of shopping, and then personal trauma struck (not for me, but for my little sis). So the next day or so was spent trying to either help her deal or make her laugh so she wouldn't think about it. As fate (whether cruel or kind) would have it, she found out on the train home that one of her best friends was going through the same thing, so they made arrangements to meet up that night and wallow together.

Being too fraught to drive (or so she claimed; frankly, she just hates driving), she asked me to take her over to her friend's house. She was only going to be there for an hour, so I decided to park the car in her friend's driveway and go for a walk. My intention was to make it all the way to where our city's Christmas lights are hung in the greatest density of colour, but I ended up only making it as far as the downtown shopping centre before having to head back. I was hoping that the crisp smell of the air, the biting wind, and the music in my headphones would provide the kind of backdrop I needed to sort out the strange and confusing state of my life. Although I did do a lot of thinking in that hour, I predictably ended up more confused than I had been when I started my walk.

I asked my sis if she wanted to do a girls-only movie night, but she said that she was just tired and needed to sleep. Maybe I should do the same; I'm feeling a sudden need to drift away...

My friends and I are nerds. Dirty, dirty nerds.

2005-12-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

Guy #1: Oh man... I have a feeling I'm going to end up tweaking my model a lot during the exam.
Girl: Hey, I don't want to see you tweaking your model at all. I don't want to see anyone tweaking their models during this exam. What you do in the privacy of your own home...
Guy #2: What would really be scary is if, while tweaking his model, his WACC goes off. (laughing) If that happens, we're all screwed!
Girl: Actually, I'd say if that happens, he's just screwing himself.

*Laughter*

Guy #2: That was a deep conversation.
Girl: Deep in all the ways but the one that matters...

I hereby resign.

2005-12-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

To Whom It May Concern:

I, ______________, am saddened to say that I must officially resign from the position I currently occupy in my own life. I have devoted a lot of time and energy to this position over the past several years, but it unfortunately no longer fits "where I'm at". I find this position stressful and taxing. Many demands are made on my time, and the few rewards I have gained directly from this position (mainly in the form of new colleagues and friends) are easily transferable to the new position I plan to occupy shortly.

So that this position might someday be filled with greater satisfaction by a more interested candidate, here is my list of grievances:

I sleep too little and spend too much time in this building
In spite of my best efforts, I have no aptitude for this job whatsoever in comparison to my colleagues, and therefore the marginal gains I will receive from continuing to hold this position will surely fail to outweigh its ongoing costs
People here give me a severe inferiority complex (i.e., make me feel stupid); they do not do this on purpose, but the lack of intent is little consolation
I am surrounded by intellect, and I am not an intellectual; I need to be around people who don't try to think their way through emotions

What will I do from here? I'm not sure. I suspect that I will run away and join the circus. I aspire to be the naked chick that rides the elephant.

Sincerely,
_________________

Interesting Facts

2005-12-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

We are all interesting people, with little quirks that make us unique from those around us. Lately I've begun noticing an inordinate number of freakish characteristics in myself, and I thought they might entertain some of you. At the very least, they should evoke some schadenfreude - "Gee, I'm glad I'm not that weird!" So here goes:

I fold things compulsively. This is especially true of wrappers. I had to stop eating Starburst because of this; it would take me hours to get through a bag, and the end result (a pile of neat, identically folded pieces of coloured paper) was often too pretty for me to part with. I think I still have a bunch in my cupboard from my last indulgence.
I am claustrophobic. But only in my legs. And only when I'm in the water. If you think about it, this makes sense. When people make contact with my legs in the water, they're usually kicking them. And when you combine that with the fact that my calves are very sensitive and prone to spontaneous cramping with even light contact, well, it's really just self-preservation. Nobody likes lactic acid build-up.
I am a symmetry freak. I like things to look the same on both sides. As part of this, I tend to buy a lot of my grocery items in pairs, unless it's totally unreasonable to do so.

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more wacky habits and characteristics! Or don't, if you'd rather not. I reserve the right to be totally uninteresting like this.

'Tis the Season

2005-12-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

You're sitting in the library. Your hands are trembling from over-consumption of Starbucks Ventis, your eyes are watering from staring at a laptop screen for too long, and your brain is bursting from the knowledge you've been frantically cramming into it like cake into a fat kid's mouth. Your mind starts to wander. Your gaze drifts upward, and that's when you see him. He's tall. He's scrawny. He's the uber-awkward guy in your Civ. Pro. class, and he has never looked so hot. Why have you never noticed it before? That adorable way his glasses are smudged... the hair on his knuckles... the sexy exam-induced neck-beard... *sigh* Yes. A shame the rugged neck-beard only comes out at exam time... You suddenly find yourself unable to concentrate on the pile of readings and the unfinished summary in front of you. All you can think about is stealing away with Neck-Beard to some secluded corner of the library, and...

Okay, stop. Let's get serious for a second. You're swooning over the ruggedness of a neck-beard? This is not normal. It must be a case of... THE EXAMMIES.

We've all been there. When stress suddenly enters your life in large doses, all at once, your body has a tendency to respond in... *ahem*... interesting ways. Is it just the stress? Is it the onset of restlessness causing you to want to do something you know you really have no time for? Is it adrenalin-induced? I don't know. I have no answers to these things. What I can do, however, is tell you the symptoms. The following are surefire signs that the exammies are setting in:

You're "noticing" people you've never noticed before. If the odour of the swarthy delivery guy is suddenly "pleasant and musky", rather than nauseating, warning bells should be going off.
You're putting innuendos into an unusual number of school-related sentences. If, for example, you make jokes about leveraging assets, assuming a wide straddle position on your options, or the occupiers' liability problems with hazardous erections, you might have the exammies. Or you might be a member of the triumvirate on a normal day.
You're exercising too much. Some people respond to the exammies by trying to cardio the stress out of their systems. This does not work. The exammies are impervious to such tactics. In fact, exercise can exacerbate the situation.

Responses to the exammies are many and varied. You can fight them with willpower, you can take cold showers (this is difficult in the library and awful in the winter), you can find a "friend" to help you fight the problem, or you can... find another way to deal with them yourself. Whatever you do, though, proceed with caution (especially around the Civ. Pro. nerd). You don't want to end up doing something (or someone) you'll regret.

All-Nighter Part Two: Welcome to Crazytown

2005-12-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

I clearly haven't learned my lesson. Or maybe I have, and this is just a matter of necessity. Either way, there is another all-nighter in progress, due to:

The microeconomics assignment due on Monday
The rest of the job I failed to complete at my last all-nighter

This time, I came prepared. And this time, I started earlier.

4pm - Shods and I hit up Sebastian's for a lunch of goodness. We then proceeded to Mac's to pick up provisions for the evening. These consisted primarily of caffeine, but there was also a lot of random snackage, including Bits & Bites, trail mix, and a cute Santa Claus gingerbread man. I put all of these things in the knapsack I brought along for such provisions (affectionately referred to as the "food bag"), and we trooped up to Chambers.

4:30pm - Chambers is steadily picking up the overflow from the closing of the library, but we've got our tables staked out, and we're good to go.

5:15pm - My Internet dies. We try in vain to fix it, but no luck. I fill out a Web form request to the school's IT department, and check my email on Shods's computer while I'm there. I break her computer somehow; she berates me, asking why I must destroy everything I touch. I find this hilarious, and immediately post it on the tri-site.

7pm - Chambers has cleared out. It's just the two of us now, and this random guy who's sitting with his back to us the whole time. I don't know who he was, but I'm strangely mesmerized by the cursive writing on the back of his big black hoodie. My Internet just fixed itself! Dammit! What's WITH this school?!

8pm - Deadpan is going to join us shortly. She warns us that she'll be dirty and PJed up - we said that that was okay, 'cause bras are for chumps. In other news, this microeconomics assignment sucks. Try as I might, I cannot bring myself to care about the taxi industry in Stockholm or the deregulation thereof. I am, however, very attracted by the colours I've used for this table. Blue and purple! Yay! (Hmmm.... Is this a sign that the crazy is setting in already?)

8:45pm - Time for a DANCE PARTY! Shods just put on The Killers, and we're rocking out slightly. It is good. Micro still sucks. I've finished my two 600-mL Diet Dr. Pepper bottles, and am about to crack the 2L of Diet Coke. Let's hope my stomach has forgiven me for last time...

9:05pm - The changing of the guard! I've been relieved of my micro duties by one of my teammates. I can't make the group meeting tomorrow until late, which is why I was doing advance work. He's eased my guilt by telling me that I've done enough for today, so I'm switching over to my summer job duties. "Separate Ways" has come onto my playlist, so I'm feeling pumped up by Journey and ready for action! No sign of Deadpan yet, but we wait with bated breath, as always.

10pm - Deadpan has arrived, safe and sound. We are a subdued triumvirate, but I think we will be a productive one. This sense of... wholeness came over me when she got here... *single tear* What the tri is, united, let no man pull asunder (as if any man could! pshaw!).

10:15pm - So much for productivity. I decided that my time would be better spent doing Internet Christmas shopping. Sloosie? Check. Shods? Check. Glo-bug? Check. The credit card is a powerful and dangerous thing...

10:55pm - I just realized that "Crazytown" is actually the name of that band that sang "Butterfly," that song that tried to be hardcore in some way but really wasn't. I wonder if anyone will find my blog by googling them? That would be awesome! Know why? It would mean that people are still googling Crazytown! And if they're still on someone's radar screen, then I think that's somehow good news for all of us, don't you? I'll keep you posted.

11:07pm - Just found a single square bracket at the end of a footnote that was a larger font size than the rest of the footnote. I RULE! I should quit school and be a copy editor. Those 3 professional degrees are overrated, anyway.

12:04am - Aw, Deadpan is blogging this night too! Check out her site for another take on the evening. I just tried to photoshop a classmate's head onto Chuck Norris's body, but the Chuck Norris photo was too small. Take note: this is the first time Chuck Norris has ever been too small for anything... Shods and I are now having a "Fromage-off," which consists of us one-upping each other with progressively cheesier songs. This all started when I began blasting some 98 Degrees, which she attempted to one-up with the same song, not realizing which 98 Degrees song I was playing. She then switched 98 Degrees songs (Will people start finding this post now by googling "98 Degrees"? That'd be almost as hilarious as "Crazytown"!), and it escalated from there. Some of her offerings have included "The Greatest Love of All," "Strawberry Wine," and "Every Rose has its Thorn;" I've played such classics as "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," "Butterfly Kisses," and "The Rainbow Connection," as performed by Kermit the Frog. I think we're calling it a draw.

12:43am - I heart ordering pizza to school. The selection was tough as we perused the Pizza-Pizza Web site, but we decided to veto anything with "bacon" in the title, which immediately cut out 1/3 of our options. Shudder. We're getting one Hawaiian, one Garden Veggie, and four free cans of Diet Pepsi. Good thing, too - our caffeine supplies here are being rapidly depleted. I should have known that 3L of pop wouldn't be enough... I was foolish, I tell you, foolish.

1:04am - No sign yet of the pizzas, but the security guard just came in and scared the bajeezus out of me. He's currently sitting in Chambers and poring over the latest issue of Nexus. Does he do this every night? Is this the break on his route? Or did he decide to just camp out here to personally supervise us? If supervision is his mandate, he's got a long night ahead of him... Good thing Nexus has that sweet crossword puzzle.

1:12am - Mr. Security Guard just left. Was it because I began blasting Joey Scarbury's "Believe it or Not" (you know that song that George used in his answering machine message in that episode of Seinfeld - "Believe it or not, George isn't at home, please leave a MESSage... at the beep")? Was he annoyed? Did it cause him to believe that we were harmless, after all? Was his break just over? Maybe we'll never know...

1:31am - Pizza is delicious. It should technically have been free, owing to the fact that the delivery man arrived outside of the 40-minute window, but he unfortunately had rather weak English skills and Deadpan couldn't make him understand the rule. We opted to pay rather than risk losing our pizza in all of the confusion. I regret nothing.

2:26am - The pizza is finished (at least, it is for me - there's still some in the box), and we've settled down to some intense working. There was a brief interruption when Shods sent us the "Longlisted passages for the Bad Sex in Fiction award" article (it was horrifyingly hilarious; there was one involving a lobster that has scarred me forever), but now it's all work and no play making the tri something something. In the paper I'm currently looking at, the publisher has capitalized the "H" in "However" everywhere that it appears in the article, whether it's at the beginning of a sentence or not. And I thought the lobster passage made my eyes bleed...

3:23am - I told Deadpan I was going to blogdate again. She questioned this decision, as I had "just posted." "But so much has happened since then!" I exclaimed, whereupon we both burst out laughing. What has happened since the last post? Well, we've relocated to the Closed Student Lounge in favour of more comfortable chairs, and we've lost Shods, who went home to sleep. She was unable to get a cab after calling three different companies, so she grudgingly opted to walk, kicking a chair on her way out of the room in frustration. Her regular rage is almost as awesome as her femme rage. The pages I have to read are slowly being turned, and the mistakes being found thereon are filling me with rage. The snow falling quietly outside is soothing it somewhat, though, and makes me wish that I was out walking in it (the snow, not the rage). Or home in my bed. Or living somebody else's life. Whatever.

7:12am - After a brief snooze and some fantastic green tea (Thanks, Deadpan!), I was ready to finish off this paper full of inappropriately "However"s. We were soon joined by my boss, who seemed somewhat happy to see us but somewhat angry that we were in the building. Allusions were made to the nice, Nexus-reading security guard being fired; I hope that was a joke, because I think he just knew based on my musical taste that we weren't a security threat. And hey, that's his professional judgment call to make. In other news, it is freezing in here. This school would save a fortune if it didn't cheap out by buying single-paned windows... If third-year heat transfer taught me nothing else (and it probably actually taught me nothing else, in retrospect), it's that double-paned glass saves you mad cash. And with that, I'm back to work.

7:25am - Deadpan has left. *single tear* And then there was one... I'm having the turkey salad I bought yesterday at Sebastian's, and it's delicious. I'm hoping that the protein will give me the strength to finish this project today so that I can sleep tonight without guilt.

9:50am - Packing it in. My eyes were starting to cross, and I drooled on the proofs a couple of times. Well folks, it's been a thin slice of heaven. Now to get an hour or so of sleep before practice...

The All-Nighter of Death

2005-11-30T15:50:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I must stay up all night to finish my summer job. This may seem strange, as it's almost December, but if you know what my summer job was it all makes perfect sense. Although this isn't due until Monday, the current state of my week really only leaves tonight to complete the task. In true triumvirate fashion, here's where you can witness my descent into madness...

4:35pm - I grab a sandwich and a Diet Coke and hunker down in Chambers to read through tomorrow's cases so I won't be entirely lost. I figure I'm going to be mostly asleep anyway, and to be both lost and asleep seems like asking for trouble (or at least, asking to be made an example of by one of the profs). I see a bunch of people I know and manage to either avoid them or have short conversations. It's not that I don't want to talk to you, guys, but this has got to get DONE.

5:45pm - Cases are read. Mostly. Now to get to the editing fun. I make a number of tentative, questionable changes. I hate my life. Surely an XL mocha from Tim's and a 25-cent piece of licorice will make things better.

6:15pm - Could it be that I've found an ACTUAL error on this page? Could it be that my work is actually ADDING VALUE to the book? Wow. I'm suddenly re-committed to the task.

7pm - Joe stopped by to visit. He was hee-lariously delightful, as always, but suddenly half an hour has gone by and I haven't flipped a page. Whatever - his impersonation of MF, from our team, was enough to give me days' worth of gleeful laughter. I told him he could make the impression more accurate by scratching himself during its delivery. He wholeheartedly agreed.

7:45pm - Time to go to practice, where I will stay until 11. Mmmm... chlorine-y goodness...

11:30pm - Home from practice. Quick change of clothes, a bowl of beef stew and a delicious digestive biscuit, and I'll be out the door again. Nothing says "fun" like staying at school all night!

12:30am - Back at school. Shods courageously volunteered to accompany me on the journey, so we're now camped out in the corner of the UCC, caffeine in hand. There's a group of students conversing loudly in Chinese next to us. This could prove to be distracting.

1:00am - Moved to bus. school. Chatter was beyond distracting and Shods was starting to "go batshit." I'm armed with $15 worth of coinage for vending machine goodness.

2:04am - Two large doses of caffeine later, Shods called it quits and headed home for showerage / beddage. Don't blame her one bit. Meanwhile, parts of my body are starting to twitch - I'm choosing to interpret that as my body's way of saying "It's GO time!!!"

2:53am - Second wind time? I recently reached the point in the night I always reach, where the sleep overwhelms me and I have at least 15 minutes of nodding off. That's usually when I call it quits. Not tonight, guy! My third Diet Coke and I are bound and determined to take a bigger bite out of these articles than that! The caffeine mercifully seems to have kicked back in, and I'm ready to focus again. Just in case, though, I should probably have a snack. Blood sugar, ACTIVATE! Form of CHOCOLATE!

3:42am - The sleepies have hit me again with a vengeance that even my fourth Diet Coke of the night is unable to combat. Solution: do my editing while pacing the room, rocking out slightly to the Aretha Franklin blaring from my laptop speakers. She's saying a little prayer for you (and me, I hope! I think I need prayers at this point. I'm really jumpy and starting to see things. And yet, through it all, I can still see immediately when a sentence is lacking an Oxford comma. Definitive proof that I'm a loser? I think so.)

4:50am - The stabbing pains in my abdomen have convinced me to lay off the Diet Coke for the night. This is tragic because I feel my caffeine levels becoming critically low. Oh well, it only hurts when I breathe...

6:30am - Calling it quits for tonight in the hopes of getting an hour of shut-eye before class starts. I've spent the last 2-3 hours working on GHT's paper, and I have a few comments. First: GHT, please stop using the hyphen before you hurt yourself. You clearly have no idea where it belongs. Second: what the hell is wrong with a one-clause sentence? Keep it simple, stupid! I don't need to read a paragraph's worth of ordered lists and semicolons before I come to a period. Third: your paper isn't as amazing as you seem to think it is. The bulk of it is just pushing the fact that you have this incredibly innovative theory; the rest is pretty much just stating the obvious. Sorry.

All right kids, that's it for me. Clearly there will be more all-nighters of death in my future, however, as I'm not even halfway done the job... Stay tuned for escalating levels of crazy.

No day but today for being mean to teenagers. Carpe sarcasm!

2005-11-25T23:08:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I find myself with a rare and delicious night off, I opt for a mellow tri-date rather than a night of drunken debauchery. Tonight was just such a night, so the three of us headed to the movie theatre for a showing of Rent. Highly enjoyable - amazing music, dazzling cast. The story lends itself better to a Broadway stage than to the big screen, I'll grant you, but it was certainly a treat for the ears.

Know what wasn't a treat for the ears? The girls giggling beside us. During the funny parts, that's acceptable. The funeral of the sweetest character in the movie, who has just died from AIDS? Less appropriate for giggling. More appropriate for a single tear, which I dutifully shed. When I hear giggling during such parts, I'm filled with a sudden desire to get stabby. Good thing there wasn't a nearby hatchet, or I would have taken no responsibility for the "whoosh" that came over me.

Although my companions, being much cooler and more prone to tolerance, trooped out of the theatre silently at the end, I thought that these youngsters could use a talking-to. I advised them that maybe next time they could grow up before coming to the movies. And that maybe nobody else wanted to hear them (or their "ew"s when there was a homosexual kiss on-screen). And that maybe next time, they could just rent the film. They were the types of girls who get really indignant and snippy over such things, so it filled me with a strange glow of joy when they could think of no response before I walked away.

My joy was dampened somewhat by the long, post-movie cab wait, but with the tri together, there's always much hilarity to pass the time. Also some fist-shaking, some double negatives, and a public spectacle provided by yours truly. The tri is fabulous, you say? You're right.

Shandy is dandy, but what I could really use right now is a kick in the head.

2005-11-19T02:44:00.000-08:00

2-day report number: 3
Bottles of Diet Coke today: 5 and counting
Consecutive hours awake: 26
Consecutive hours working: 25
Pages of pointless marketing exhibits: 10
Number of exhausted MBA kids in this tiny room: 5
Chest pain episodes: 4
Meals on campus: at least 8 (hey, some were just snacks!)
Yelling matches: 3
More-fun activities turned down to be here: 2 (Harry Potter and a night on the town)
Hours until company arrives for the weekend: 10
Reports about shandy generated: 1
Amount of shandy actually consumed: None

Fuck.

Rage-o-hol...

2005-11-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

...It's both deadly and addictive. Sadly, I suspect that one of my professors this year is a rageoholic. While I would ordinarily sympathize with him and his plight, I can't help but feel that it's entirely his fault. He's one of those professors who, during class discussions, is SO open and engaging that it feels fake somehow. He "really appreciates" people's input, and is all compliments, all the time for the "great work" people are doing. But every once in a while, you get a glimpse of the angry, angry man lurking below the surface. Yesterday was one of those times.

We were discussing something in class (I can't remember what - these things all melt together over time), and a comment was made that prompted one of the students on the other side of the room to mutter something under his breath. I don't think it was anything particularly inflammatory or insulting to anyone. More just funny. Naturally, the people around that student had a quick chuckle at what he said. They weren't rude or obnoxious about it, they just had a bit of a laugh. And that's when the first cracks showed on our prof. He stopped talking immediately, he set his mouth in a firm line, and this incredible rage seemed to be boiling just beneath the calm, struggling to make its way into his face. The only place in which it succeeded was his eyes. The rage only took over his eyes for a second or two, but let me tell you, if there had been a nearby hatchet, as so often happens in crim cases, I might not be here to tell this story.

So what's the deal? Why doesn't this guy just play sports? Or just take up sarcasm? I feel like he'd be a much happier guy if he just went off on people once in a while, instead of waiting until he was ready to snap like one of those cool 80s bracelets. He kind of reminds me of the "Serenity Now" episode of Seinfeld... I hope that this story ends with fewer computer smashings, but just in case, I think I'll sit in the back for the rest of the year.

Too much mayhem, not enough mischief...

2005-11-04T03:01:00.000-08:00

My life lately has been a whirlwind - schoolwork and athletic commitments rain down on me with the force of any natural disaster. I fear that the momentum of my life is getting set to carry me straight into a brick wall... There's been too much time spent being the responsible student lately. Something's gotta give.

I fear that that something may be my willingness to resist the lure of alcohol until December. Such a lofty goal was clearly doomed to never be met; Try-Hard is doomed to periodically go staggeringly rapidly to the opposite end of the "try" spectrum, engaging in levels of debauchery the likes of which are all too often seen from members of this particular institution.

The perfect opportunity for said fun and frolic may be Saturday's pre-arranged and pre-paid festivities:

Sudden Release of Stress + European Costume + Open Bar = Huge Trouble.

This, of course, begs the question "What is European costume?" Am I to show up dressed as the Queen of England, with a silly hat and white gloves, looking as though I'm attired for a polo match? Should I dress in French chic, bored and aloof with a cigarette in my hand, and complain in a loud accent about "Ze rude Américains"? Or would the brothels of Amsterdam be most appropriate, with pleather and fishnets galore? I have no idea, but am open to suggestions...

The time is 3pm now. Only 25 hours 'til blast-off...

Ah, Billy Joel...

2005-10-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

"They say there’s a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it’s better but I say it ain’t
I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
The sinners are much more fun..."

--Only the Good Die Young

My right quadricep...

2005-10-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

... Has been numb and tingly for about 48 hours now. I woke up on Monday morning, and there it was (or wasn't). It's incredibly disconcerting... the feeling is kind of like when you fall asleep on one of your arms, and then wake up in the middle of the night to scratch your head and end up hitting yourself repeatedly in the face. Well, it's not quite that bad. Oh, and it's not like I've ever actually done that.

[uncomfortable pause]

It's actually more like the slight tingle that you get in your hands after too many hours of working on a laptop. I can still feel it, it just feels wrong. As you can imagine, this worried me. And so, with visions of spinal tumors and blood clots dancing in my head, I dragged myself to the doctor yesterday. He seemed a bit unsettled when my response to "Have you been hit or kicked there recently?" was "I don't know. Probably. I wouldn't have noticed anyway." Regardless, his diagnosis was delivered swiftly.

Verdict? Nothing to worry about.

He ruled out any of the less pleasant options, then told me that I had probably just sustained some nerve damage. Possibly temporary, possibly permanent. "Don't worry," he reassured me. "It's not like you really need feeling there anyway." Well, okay, I'll buy that, but it seems like such a waste not to have feeling there. I mean, if you're going to have a part of your body that's permanently numb, you should be able to do something fun with it. Like stab pens into it without flinching. For parties and stuff, you know?

So in case this doesn't end up clearing up, I'd like to give a shout-out to the nerve endings in my right quad. It's been one hell of a ride, guys.

Excited Mannequins

2005-10-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

I was out shopping today, in search of a fall coat, and I had a startling realization: about half of the mannequins I saw displaying women's clothing in store windows had their headlights fully on. Apparently they were either really cold or REALLY excited to see me.

Why would mannequin designers do this? Do pointy nipples somehow enhance the aesthetics of women's clothes? Do they sell more shirts this way? Is it some kind of clever ruse - a collaboration with La Senza, perhaps - to force store owners to buy lingerie to make their displays look decent (or at least, as decent as clothes these days will allow)? Is it the designer's idea of a joke? Also, how much extra does it cost to make them? That's gotta amount to extra plastic, if not extra manufacturing costs. Is it worth it, mannequin people? Is it?

Theme Songs

2005-10-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

I, like many people, have a theme song. Many people may not realize or admit that they have theme songs, but these people are kidding themselves. A theme song is a song that comes on (on your playlist, on the radio, on the CD you're listening to, or whatever), and no matter what you're doing, you always stop and think to yourself "Man, this song is so me." And everyone does this, even if it's only subconsciously. It's about having that connection to the song, you know?

I have a number of observations about theme songs. As usual, I'd like to present these in a bulleted list:

A theme song doesn't have to remain constant over your lifetime, or over any significant period of time. If you need a theme song to represent the way you're feeling today, that's good enough.
The theme song can describe only a very small aspect of your life. I had a friend last year who had just gone through a tough break-up because she didn't want to have a long-distance relationship anymore. Once she got over it, she was ready to hit the dating scene for the first time in years. Her theme song for this endeavour? Return of the Mack. Would this be an appropriate theme song for her to listen to when she woke up in the morning? Or when she was getting ready for a big game? Probably not. However, when it came to getting ready to hit the clubs with her girls, there was nothing better.
You can have more than one theme song at once. I'm the kind of person who lets certain moods consume me, so it can be difficult to hold more than one theme song at once (call it a kind of cognitive dissonance problem). However, that being said, I still currently have a theme song that can always be relevant to what's going in my life. Which brings me to my next point:
I think that the best theme songs are all of the things I just said that they didn't have to be. They're constant over a significant period of time, they can always describe you and where you're at, and they have a sort of over-arching quality to them; that is, they capture not only your mood, but your whole approach to life.

Now that you've heard my pitch on what theme songs mean to me, you're probably wondering, "What's your theme song?" (If this is not what you're wondering, then I apologize. I'm about to tell you anyway.) Answer: Defying Gravity, from Wicked (a Broadway musical about the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West). No, I have nothing against physics, Newtonian or otherwise (in fact, anyone who knows me probably knows me that I'm a big fan, particularly of those three laws of his). This song may be about actually defying gravity, but as you're about to see, it's about much more than that. Here are the highlights:

Something has changed within me; something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing... Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes
And leap
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you can't pull me down...

I'm through accepting limits 'cause someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change, but 'til I try I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of losing love I guess I've lost
Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost

I'd sooner buy defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye - I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down...
So if you care to find me, look to the Western sky
As someone told me lately, everyone deserves a chance to fly
And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free
To those who'd ground me, take a message back from me

Tell them how I am defying gravity
I'm flying high, defying gravity
And soon I'll match them in renown

And nobody in all of Oz
No wizard that there is or was
Is ever gonna bring me down

So what's your theme song?

I'm a failure as a human being...

2005-10-04T22:56:00.000-07:00

...Someday I will blog again. And there will be laughter and tears, and discussions of theme songs and regression (linear and otherwise), and stories of screaming tendons and my newfound love of corporate finance (and of the Almost Famous soundtrack - Valentine, you blow me away). But for now, there will be sleep. With any luck, tomorrow morning there will be an alarm clock waking me up in time to get to physio.

2005-09-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

"'Cause when I look down
I just miss all the good stuff
And when I look up
I just trip over things..."
-- As Is

Interim scientific results

2005-09-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

"What happens when you combine severe exhaustion with physical over-exertion and mental calisthenics, and then neglect to eat?" I asked myself. Thus was an experiment conducted. The results are only preliminary right now, but effects include:

The onset of an overly emotional state (e.g., unexplained bouts of hysteria)
Headaches
Dizziness
Dry heaving

Possible biases in the results:

PMS
The drama that continues to plague my life

I'll keep you posted as results emerge. Until the experiment is completed, however, you may want to steer clear of me (or try to appease me with gifts of dinner - your choice).

2005-09-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

"And what's the sense in being so sensitive?
Can I trade this thin skin for a shell?"
-- Capsized

And you can quote me on this

2005-09-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, guess what? I like quotations. Particularly from songs, but I do stray from that periodically. The following are a few of my favourites. I may make this a semi-regular feature, 'cause I just can't do this topic justice all in one night.

Here's the one that inspired the name of this blog - I thought it was the most appropriate way to start:

"I wanna dance with you
I see a world where people live and die with grace
The karmic ocean dried up, and leaves no trace
I wanna dance with you
I see a sky full of the stars that change our minds
And lead us back to a world we would not face."
-- Dance With You

This one is from a play I studied in OAC French. If you don't speak French, look this puppy up or ask someone who does - it's absolutely beautiful:

"Vous souvient-il du soir où Christian vous parla
sous le balcon? Eh bien - toute ma vie est là
Pendant que je restais en bas, dans l'ombre noir
d'autres montaient cueillir le baiser de la gloire.
C'est justice, et j'approuve au seuil de mon tombeau:
Molière a du génie et Christian était beau!"
-- Cyrano de Bergerac

A little bit of Ani now:

"Sleepwalking through the all-night drugstore
Baptized in fluorescent light
I found religion in the greeting card aisle
And now I know Hallmark was right
'Cause every pop song on the radio
Is suddenly speaking to me
Yeah, art may imitate life
But life imitates TV"
-- Superhero

"You give me that look that's like laughing
With liquid in your mouth
Like you're choosing between choking
And spitting it all out
Like you're trying to fight gravity
On a planet that insists
That love is like falling
And falling is like this"
-- Falling is Like This

"And they say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time"
-- Little Plastic Castle

"God help you if you are an ugly girl
Though too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbours a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
And God help you if you are a phoenix
And you dare to rise up from the ash
A thousand eyes will smoulder with jealousy
While you are just flying past"
-- 32 Flavours

One last one for the road, and I'll call it a night:

"And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah"
-- Hallelujah

Frequently Asked Questions

2005-09-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, so maybe these questions haven't actually been asked by anyone, but I can answer them all based on my experiences over the past few days. Buckle your seatbelts.

Q. How easy is it to wake up at 9 on a Saturday morning and start working when you were out drinking/dancing until 3am the night before?
A. There's no one answer to this. It depends, in large measure, on a) the amount of alcohol consumed, b) the amount of dancing done, and c) the amount of poutine and homemade candy consumed after said drinking/dancing. The ease of waking is directly proportional to (c) and inversely proportional to the other two. Giant nerd = me.

Q. What happens when you put a five-dollar bill through the washing machine and dryer?
A. Surprisingly little. Those little suckers take a lickin' but keep on tickin'. And by "tickin'", I mean "retaining their ability to be exchanged for goods and/or services... possibly a Starbucks coffee."

Q. What happens when you put your ticket to Interfac-a-palooza through the washing machine and dryer?
A. It gets shredded. Absolutely shredded. To the point where it's pretty much unrecognizable as the ticket for which you paid $5 only one day before. Lucky that fiver survived, eh?

Q. Why is Patrick Swayze so hot in Dirty Dancing?
A. This is a question with many answers.

He can dance. Any man with that much control over his pelvic movements is A-OK in my books.
He rages out on Robbie (the waiter who impregnated Penny and then wouldn't give her money for an abortion) with a lot of passion and intensity. I get chills whenever I see him knee that slimeball in the stomach and then slam him into the porch.
That scene where he takes Baby out into nature to teach her balance and how to do the lifts... When he beckons her to get on that log with him (and his black tank top)... well, let's just say I'd get on his log any day. I wonder if he has a position for me on his staff? Okay, enough innuendo for this post.
"Nobody puts Baby in the corner." Need I say more?

Q. Have you ever thought about quitting school and slaying vampires for a living?
A. Yes. Yes I have.

Q. What's the best line you've heard all day?
A. "Oh man - what I wouldn't do to Scully." (Yes, he was talking about the agent from X-Files.)

All right, gotta learn about investing now. The end.

Is this my future?

2005-09-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I met "the devil". The face of corporate greed; the "pathological pursuit of profit and power" of which Joel Bakan wrote. I didn't think these guys really existed. But here was a man, standing in front of me, lecturing me on how the best investments were in companies in which the guy in charge was a greedy pig - a total asshole. His philosophy was that only the shareholder matters: shareholders are the ones with the equity, so they control everything. If you have a guy in charge of a company who wants nothing more in the world than to increase shareholder value, then that's a guy you want controlling your money.

We had spent the morning studying a company that had a much more balanced philosophy (though perhaps a bit more leftist than I would generally lean): Ben & Jerry's. They donated 7.5% of their earnings each year to various local charities, and were focused on providing a good product at the most reasonable price they could get away with. If corporations were actual people, not just legal people, this was a corporation you'd want to hang out with on the weekends. According to our speaker, though, these guys were the real problem. What right, he asked, did they have to give that much of their shareholders' profits away? He reasoned that as an investor, if he wanted to give money to United Way, he'd do that himself from the profits his investments were making.

He told us that the most important lesson we could learn was that as employees, we had zero value. Zero value. If he could find someone else to do your job at half the cost, he said, he'd do it in a heartbeat.

So I called him on it. "Isn't there an argument to be made," I said, "that if you value your employees, they'll be more motivated to generate value for you?" "Yes," he responded. "You could make that argument. But I sure as hell won't be investing in your company." Apparently my argument was premised on the idea that an employee had value, and that was its fundamental flaw. This guy also told us, unabashedly, that to make it where he'd gotten, he hadn't seen his kids for the first five years of their lives. Had it been worth it? He said he'd do it again in a heartbeat.

I sat there for the rest of the lecture, feeling shocked that this was a guy who could quite possibly be representative of the culture in which I've chosen to immerse myself. Was this what I would have to become in order to be successful? The idea shocked and sickened me. As far as I'm concerned, who wants to be the richest person alive if you're emotionally bankrupt?

Mucilage

2005-09-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

So did you ever wonder why, when you're adding flour to hot liquids, the recipe tells you to remove said hot liquid from the heat source first? Mystery solved: if you leave it on the burner and add the flour, the flour clumps and turns into paste. Yup, paste. Full of paste-y goodness.

PS: Anyone wanna try my beef stew? It really... ahem... sticks to the ribs.

Layers and radar and expired meat (oh my!)

2005-08-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting around after a good, hard workout, waiting for my dinner to finish cooking. Dinner is a lone, expired sausage of the A&P variety, purchased on a shopping trip with L last week after the gym. Because we had just worked out, fairly late at night, and hadn't yet had supper, I pretty much wanted to buy and eat everything in the store, but settled on a package of spicy Italian sausages as my treat o' the week. I've only got one left, and it expired yesterday, but unless I want to resort to another meal today of eggs and toast, it's pretty much all I've got. That and a couple of packages of discounted salad from Sebastian's, but even they are a mere hour and a half from being past their prime.

It's been a very weird weekend. I'm starting my new program (or the orientation for it, anyway) tomorrow, so I've got this excitement and anticipation that a whole other chapter of my life is about to begin. And this excitement is co-mingled with a sense of relief that I'm getting out of the place I've been for the last year. Not that I don't love the people there - on the contrary, I've met some of the greatest friends I will ever know over these past 12 months, and I'm sad to be leaving them, even if it's just for a building a block away. However, the better you get to know people, the more layers of complexity you add to your relationships with them. In some cases, this is good; the better I've gotten to know some people, the more I've liked them. A great example of this is the triumvirate: we got along just fine for the school year, but it wasn't until we started hanging out together all the time that we realized that, by our powers combined, we can accomplish anything (and we may soon make t-shirts to that effect).

However, with some people, you're better off just getting the superficial view. This increasing complexity means that you're learning more and more about each other - good and bad. Lately, I feel like I've been learning a lot of bad, and I'm ready for things to just be simple again. Easy. When you feel like you've totally misjudged someone, and then that happens over and over, you start to think that maybe your people radar is totally on the fritz. Or that people just generally aren't as great as you might like to think they are. Frankly, I'm just not ready to be that jaded at this point in my life - I was pretty happy with my high-school level of naïveté. So I need a break from all of this.

Looks like my sausage is ready. I cooked it for an extra five minutes in the hopes that any "rotten" would be cooked away. Only one way to know for sure! If my next post is entitled "food poisoning", we'll know I should have ordered pizza instead.

Bus trips

2005-08-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

I love bus trips. This may sound strange to some of you, but it's absolutely true. I had the pleasure of taking a bus trip (albeit a short one) last weekend, and it was delightful. I like bus trips for a number of reasons:

If I'm tired, they're a great place to sleep. During undergrad, I lived a couple of hours away from my hometown, and liked to go home some weekends to get the "mom" treatment (home-cooked meals, the bed I slept in as a kid, laundry, etc.). I'd always take the 7am bus. Why? It was a great place to sleep. Now, I have the somewhat rare ability to sleep anywhere. Anytime. (No, seriously: I once slept for 3 hours as a team of construction workers nailed in carpet around my bed.) So I'd get out of bed, grab my duffel bag (note: my pajamas were still on at this point), grab a pillow and a blanket, and get on a bus! If you head straight to the back, there's often a group of 3 seats together. That is the BEST place on the whole bus to sit (if you can stand the smell of the washroom, which is always kind of disinfectant-y). You can stretch yourself across all 3 seats, and if you're a bit of a foetal-position sleeper, as I am, it's just the right size for you. Just put the pillow down and you're good to go.
If I'm not tired, they're a great place to do other things. Sometimes I do work on the bus. Never a lot of work, and never work of a supremely high level of quality or neatness, but I can get work done on the bus. I can also read: no motion sickness whatsoever. But my favourite thing to do on the bus is often just to sit and think about my life. Where it's been; where it's going; places I want it to go; places where I think I've made wrong turns. I like to keep tabs on exactly where I stand, so I can make sure it's not somewhere I'd rather not be standing. This "life inventory" is usually facilitated by two things. Good tunes (I like the songs that sound more... well, open, I guess; they suit the atmosphere of the bus better), and...
...The atmosphere. Buses are full of people going places. And leaving other places behind. There's a lot of emotion associated with those things, sometimes. And as much as people sometimes complain about it, travelling by bus gives you a chance to build up some excitement about the fact that you're on a journey (even if it's just to get to an interview, or to see your Aunt Mildred). The scenery is a big part of that anticipation. You're moving: everything is rushing past you, and you don't have to take it all in. In fact, it's better if you don't take it in. You can enjoy the lack of focus. You can enjoy that coloured blur outside. I spend so much time in my daily life running around and trying to get things done that it's a treat not to have to think or to have to do anything.

I had a strangely intense moment on this bus trip last week. I was tired from the weekend's exertions, of course, and I let myself drift off to sleep. When I woke up, my eyes were drawn to the right side of the bus: the whole window was alight with colour. Although the sun had already disappeared below the horizon, I could tell just by looking at the way the sky was painted at that moment that the sunset must have been the most perfect sunset in the history of the world. Clouds were dotting the sky in just the right places to accentuate, not obstruct, the colour, and the colour was the most incredible and vibrant I've ever seen. Yellows, oranges, reds, and finally, purples... Breathtaking.

A couple of things struck me at that moment, as I opened my eyes from my brief nap. The first was that I had missed this sunset. Yes, I had caught this part of it, and this part of it was wonderful, but I had missed what must have been a truly incredible display. Why? Because I had needed a nap. This turned into me making the sunset a metaphor for my life, which I won't even attempt to get into (mostly because it was that "I just woke up and am vaguely drowsy and dopey" kind of thinking). I was also struck by the stark contrast between the right- and left-hand sides of the bus: on the right was this beautiful natural art, and on the left was a sky that had gotten so dark that it, and everything below it, seemed totally monochrome - just shades of grey. I started to draw comparisons between my life and this perfectly divided scene, too, but was interrupted. We had arrived.

Back to life, back to reality.

2005-08-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

I have recently taken issue with reality television. Not with the shows themselves, but with the fact that they are dubbed as "reality" television. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Survivor: In this show, a bunch of people are voluntarily stranded on a desert island with few comforts. Okay, I can dig it. Periodically, one of them gets voted off. Maybe this is meant to simulate the slow dying-out of the survivors. Again, this is at least somewhat realistic, though I'm sure the intervals of dying would be a little more sporadic in real life. But what about these reward challenges? If I was stranded on a real desert island (or in a jungle somewhere, or in any of the various places they've chosen for the show), I'm sure there would be good surprises sometimes. Maybe I'd occasionally find a delicious piece of fruit, or some particularly useful driftwood. Super. Often, though, they're given things like pizza and chips, or a night in a hotel-style bed. What island are you on that this is an option? Long Island? Coney Island? If that's the case, then just walk to back to civilization and stop being stranded. But put the impossibility of the rewards aside for a second. If a pizza did mysteriously arrive in the midst of my fellow survivors and I, I'm sure that I wouldn't have to compete in ridiculous contests to be the one to get it. A relay in which you have to spin around in a chair? A contest where you stand on posts in the middle of the ocean? A race? Come on, people. If you're starving on an island, the name of the game is energy conservation. Are you really going to exert yourself when you're barely getting enough calories each day to continue breathing and walking upright? Also, what's this "bring a friend to share your reward" nonsense? If I was starving on a desert island and a pizza showed up, you can bet your ass I'd be eating that whole thing myself. Teamwork, shmeamwork.

Average Joe: This is the show where the woman thinks she's going to be courted by a bunch of The Bachelor-esque, attractive, successful men, only to learn that the group of men from which she must chose her dates is, well, average. Some are fat, some are skinny, and some have strange hair, but the one thing that they have in common is that they are all men that she would never, ever date in real life. Now, the one thing these guys all have going for them is that they're sweet as pie and so happy to be dating this awesome girl (the girls on this show are always stunningly beautiful and generally pretty cool) that they treat her like a princess 24/7. Now, I think that a lot of these guys are awesome. But since I tend to love nerds and despise "pretty boys", maybe I'm not the best judge on this. As much as I think they're great, though, the girl is never really that into them. And if this truly was "reality", this would not be the group from which she would be picking her dates. This would be the group from which she would be picking her computer technicians.

Temptation Island: This, to me, is the worst of the "reality TV" offenders. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that I find the concept to be rather depraved and cruel, but I'll ignore that for the time being. Imagine yourself as a contestant on the show. You're separated from your significant other by the width of an island, and you're surrounded by good-looking, charming people of the opposite sex whose entire role on the show is to try to sleep with you. Whose reality is this, and how can I go there?!

Don't even get me started on The Surreal Life (in reality, I would never live with a bunch of washed-up stars), The Ultimate Fighter (I have yet to ever get bloodied in the octagon), or Joe Millionaire (he would never have pulled that off without a network to give him the house, the cars, the plane, and the cash). This rant is long enough.

Your body is a wonderland, you say? My body is a science experiment.

2005-08-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

The human body is an amazing thing. I've been putting my own through various exercises in sleep-deprivation and over-exertion this year, and although there have been minor breakages, I have yet to experience any kind of total system failure. I have, during the course of my experimentation, been able to make a number of interesting observations about my body:

It hurts, in some way or another, pretty much all the time. Is this normal? I have no idea; mine is the only body I've ever lived in. The aches and pains never last longer than 48 hours or so (with a couple of notable exceptions), after which they move on to totally different locations in my body. I have a theory that this happens to a) make my life more interesting and b) to give sore spots a break before they get hurt in some other way. My constant level of pain is, I think, my body's cry for attention, like an angst-ridden teenager dyeing her hair black.
When it gets too tired, it gets cold. And shaky. I think that this is because my body is channelling what little energy I have to my brain, leaving little to heat my extremities or give them motor control. Having no knowledge of how a human body actually uses energy, though, I have no idea whether this is true or not.
It can do way more than I think it can. In fact, in the mind/body duo, I think the mind is the weaker of my links. This is probably true of a lot of people, and provides a good explanation for the success of personal trainers and coaches: they believe in you so you don't have to believe in yourself.
It needs food almost all the time. Really - I have to eat every three hours or so, or I get cranky and nauseous. Usually what it wants the most is protein (so it won't feel hungry anymore). I did, however, have an incredibly intense craving last night for Honey Nut Cheerios, so that just goes to show that it can surprise me sometimes.
When it gets burned, it hurts a lot. My body doesn't often get burned, but it did this morning, while I was making breakfast. I have discovered that oatmeal burns hurt much more than boiling-water burns. Boiling water, you see, touches your skin and burns it, but is usually no longer on your skin (or is no longer boiling) by the time you feel the pain. Oatmeal, on the other hand, is stickier and denser, which causes two problems. First, it retains heat more readily; second, it adheres to your skin so that it can continue to burn you. The lesson here is that you should keep oatmeal (and really, probably just any grain-based hot breakfast cereal) away from your skin if at all possible.

This is all I can think of for now. I'll keep you apprised of any more earth-shattering discoveries my body and I make together.

I hate Paris in the springtime, I hate Paris in the fall.

2005-08-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'm frequently full of rage, but there is a certain Hilton sister who fills me with a lot of it. It's not so much that she is who she is and behaves the way she behaves; if people are willing to pay her $200 000 to appear at their parties for 15 minutes, and TV producers want to employ her to go around the country and act like a skank, more power to her. What I resent so much, I think, is that she's pretty much it in the role model department these days.

I was watching South Park with my roommate the other day (which I rarely do), and Ms. Hilton was the one being mercilessly mocked. I loved it. At the same time, though, I was slightly horrified at the amount of truth in it. Sure, her mannerisms were exaggerated, as were the responses of young girls to her, but young girls really do look at her, and her lifestyle, and the way she behaves, and the way she dresses, and think that it's not only appropriate, but admirable!

I was watching an episode of Dr. Phil (no jokes, please) last year, and the show was featuring young girls who wanted to be rich but didn't want to work for it. One guest stood out in my mind. Her personal heroine was Paris Hilton. When asked why, she said "Well, she's so young, and look at how much she's accomplished!" No jokes. She admired her because of her accomplishments. If I could inject this post with sarcasm somehow, that last line would have been dripping with it. "What accomplishments?" Dr. Phil asked. "Well, she and her sister design handbags..."

What is the world coming to when the people that young girls look up to are known for partying, having sex tapes posted on the Internet, and designing handbags? What ever happened to kids idolizing athletes, and astronauts, and teachers, and doctors, and people of substance?

Moral of my story: please stop putting her in the movies. Please stop putting her on TV. Please stop publishing accounts of her activities in the news. I'm sick of this kid.

Ordered Lists

2005-08-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed by now that I put much of what I write into a series of numbered points. The reason for that is this: I love ordered lists. I love the way they can turn a bunch of random thoughts into some kind of cohesive argument. I love how much more readable they make things. People should use ordered lists in everything; personally, I find even long, angry rants much more credible when the person at least seems to be trying to order her rant into a number of discrete points.

There's very little point to this post. I just wanted to put my OL-related love out there; if you don't like it, you can send it right back. More later.

Random thoughts about flight

2005-07-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

I should probably be completing the "Getting to know you" post before moving on, but pressing matters have recently come to my attention; I think that they need to be addressed immediately.

I'm working from home today. Home is the top floor of an apartment building, and it affords me a fantastic view of the city below me and an unobstructed view of the sky above (not one of the neighbouring buildings is nearly as high as mine is). Today is pretty much a picture-perfect day. The sky is a pristine blue, there's a light breeze, and only a few wisps of cloud are in the sky - it's almost as though they were painted in as an afterthought. From my vantage point on the couch, I can see directly out the window, and at this angle, all that's visible through the window is that sky.

So I was sitting here, thinking about how inviting that sky looks, when it hit me: actually being able to fly is probably not all it's cracked up to be. I'm sure that "I wish I could fly" is among the top 5 wishes of all time (with "I wish I was rich", "I wish I was beautiful", "I wish I was powerful", and, the bane of any genie's existence, "I wish for an infinite number of wishes"), but let's consider for a few minutes. There are a number of things that could make flying a real pain in the ass, even for creatures that are meant to do so.

Effort expended: Sure, it looks easy, but anything does if it's done well. And birds are built to fly well. Those that don't, I imagine, are not the ones we see soaring lazily through the air, pirouetting through the clouds. They're the ones we see lying dead on the sidewalk, or the ones that scare the living hell out of us as they smash into our windshields. If just moving across the ground is difficult, imagine how hard it is to move through the air! It's not just about moving forward - you'd also have to support yourself aloft and fight the air currents that push you off-course (and if you think wind is bad on the ground, that's nothing compared to what it must be up high, where it's virtually unimpeded). If you think running is tiring, then flying is obviously much more so.
Having wings: When you think about it, birds are carrying around some pretty heavy equipment in order to be able to do what they do. And the bigger the bird, the bigger the wingspan needed to support it. If you're an eagle, your wings must just get in the way of everything! Sure they look majestic, but majesty's going to do you zero good when your wings accidentally get dragged through a puddle of muck in the forest for the umpteenth time! And if you think you knock a lot of things over by accident now... well, let's just say it's a good thing you don't have arms that are 6 inches longer and feathers all over.
Inclement weather: You can run during a thunderstorm, or during a snowstorm. Believe me, I've done it. It's not fun, but it can be done. But imagine trying to fly during either: the wind would toss you around like you were made out of paper, and all the rain might weigh you down too much for you to even be able to keep yourself aloft (I'll spare you the free-body diagram here, but you get the idea). And I'm not just talking about getting water-logged here. Even the force of individual raindrops hitting you would get exhausting pretty quickly. And what about tornados? They have to "touch down" for them to bother us much on the ground, but not so if you're flying. Imagine being out for a leisurely Sunday flight with the kids and suddently getting blindsided by one of those puppies! It'd be like going for a Sunday jog and suddenly being sucked into a clothes dryer!
Breaks: If you're running and you get tired, you can just stop running. You'll stop moving, but nothing more serious is likely to happen to you. Again, this isn't true of flying. If you stop flying, sure you might be able to glide for a while, but there are limits to this. Eventually, you'll hit the ground. And if you're not flapping those wings, it might not be pretty. Plus, what if you're flying over water? Some birds are built to float, but are they all? What if you're on a long flight over a big lake and you get a cramp or something? Shore is miles and miles away, and you're not a swimmer-type bird. Do you just have to "push through the pain"? Do you give up and drop into the lake? I just don't know.

I'm sure there are more potential drawbacks to flight that I'm missing, but I think that this list alone should make people re-think wanting to fly. So next time you see a bird circling over your head, don't be jealous - be respectful. He might be looking at you striding easily across the ground and thinking "Geez, I wish I could do that; I'm sick of flying, and those dumb little hops I'm forced to do when I stay on the ground are just getting me nowhere."

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you... Part 1

2005-07-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

All right, now that we've gotten introductions out of the way, who am I? I'm going to be purposely vague on this front; I'd rather not be identifiable to any but those who know me well, due to the aforementioned ridiculousness of things that will likely be discussed here. I will, however, try to paint you a general picture:

What I like:

Grammar and punctuation - nothing warms my little heart quite as much as seeing a hyphen or an apostrophe put in the right spot, and faulty parallel structure chills me to the bone.
Boy bands - their choreographed dances may be silly and their songs may be cheesy and formulaic, but ever since my first concert (New Kids On the Block), I can't help but enjoy a group of 5 men singing in harmony, in spite of the truck-driver gear-shift key changes and frightening falsetto that is often involved.
Working out - those who know me call me a workaholic. I admit it - I am addicted to workahol. This isn't just in my job, though: it carries over into pretty much every area of my life. So even when it comes to doing weights, running, or doing practices for my sport of choice (hint: it's a team sport, played in a pool, in which people often hit each other... and it's not synchro), I find it difficult, if not impossible, to give less than 110%. Deep down, I guess I believe that it gives me some kind of mental toughness to push my body to the point where it tells me it can't possibly do another rep, or take another step, or swim another stroke, or run that drill even one more time, and then push it just a little bit further. In the alternative, I could just be a be a weirdo.
Watching movies - it doesn't matter what the film is, and it doesn't matter whether I'm at home or in a theatre. I love the act of sitting down in a darkened room, alone or with others, and letting the flickering screen take me away somewhere. I have a DVD collection that grows larger every year, and would rather buy new ones than new clothes or groceries, most of the time. I've had to curb the habit these past few years, with my ever-mounting debt, but I'm sure it will reach new heights once I have a real job. Ironically, once I get that "real job", I probably won't have time anymore to watch movies, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Eating - again, it doesn't matter what I'm eating. I like the act of sitting down to a meal. This is probably true for several reasons: (a) it means a few minutes where I am forced to take a break from whatever it is I'm doing, (b) I get to look forward to this break in my hectic life three times a day (or more - when I'm in training I usually need to eat at least 4 meals per day), (c) I hate the empty, rumbly feeling of hunger, and (d) I just love food. My favourite meals are pizza (best if eaten while curled up on your couch at home in front of a good movie), cereal (all kinds, though I'm a particular fan of Corn Bran), and a good sandwich (the best one ever comes from Common Ground, in Kingston - it's a turkey-apple-cheddar sandwich with honey mustard and mayo on homemade sunflower seed bread: to die for). Generally, though, I enjoy anything I don't have to prepare myself.
Music - I have the most eclectic (and, some would say, awful) taste in music around. Along with boy bands, I'll listen to rock, pop, alternative, adult contemporary, classical, opera, jazz, Broadway musical soundtracks - the works. It all depends on my mood. Because I like such a wide variety of sounds and artists, I'm hard-pressed to identify a "favourite band"... so I just won't.
Singing at the top of my lungs - I do this neither very often nor very impressively, but I relish the opportunity whenever it presents itself. Favourite songs to sing loudly: "Freefallin'", "Big Spender", "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy", "Every Rose Has Its Thorn", "What a Good Boy", "Belle", "Jump Around" (not really singing, I guess), "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Good Morning Baltimore", "Defying Gravity", "Polyester Bride", "Push", "The Calendar Girl", and "Dance With You" (yes, the song that inspired my site name).
Shaking it like a Polaroid picture - first, a disclaimer: I hear that you're not supposed to actually shake Polaroid pictures. But that being said, you know what I mean: I like to dance. Again, I don't pretend to have any skill whatsoever in this area, but I don't think there's a person in the world who can truthfully say that he doesn't enjoy rocking out in private when there's nobody around to judge. I do have occasional dance parties in the library to satisfy minor dance urges, but when I've really got to dance, I've got to go out somewhere, it has to be dark, and it has to be loud enough that I can feel the bass throbbing through the floor.
Driving - True story about me: my mom used to want me to be a truck driver. Really. She saw this Oprah show about female truck drivers and decided that this was something that I was destined to do. After all, I did really like driving, mesh-backed caps, and plaid flannel, so why not? While sorely tempted, I ultimately opted for a life-path that would teach me how to design them instead. However, there's still nothing I like better than a good, long road trip with a sunny sky, good tunes, a friend or two, and a hot cup of coffee mixed with hot chocolate.

It just struck me that this post is getting fairly long, so I'm going to cut it off here for today. Stay tuned for "What I don't like", "Things to do and places to go before I die", "Mortal Enemies", etc.

And so it begins...

2005-07-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I never thought I would see the day when I would start one of these. Although I've always found it somewhat therapeutic to let words pour out of my fingers and fill a page, I've been hesitant to put those words out where anyone can read them. I think this has been true for a number of reasons:

I'm notoriously bad at continuing things for any period of time. Any diary I started in my angst-ridden youth would invariably have only one or two entries in it, and those entries would eventually be ripped out and shredded into tiny pieces for fear that someone would one day read them and know how ridiculous my everyday thoughts were. If this ever becomes the sort of page that people care to read, I don't want to be a sporadic poster - it goes against my nature to even think of letting people down.
I consider myself to be a fairly boring individual. I don't do particularly interesting or exciting things, I don't have any kind of special knowledge (in spite of the ridiculous amount of education I'm in the process of accumulating), I'm not especially eloquent, and, unlike some of my friends, very few of my thoughts are profound.
For the two aforementioned reasons, I think that blogging, in my case, would be a fairly self-serving exercise, designed to gather my thoughts into some kind of coherent text for my own purposes, rather than to keep friends informed of my goings-on, to voice my opinions on politics or the state of the nation, or any of the other reasons other people have for starting a blog.

And yet, here I am. So what made me decide to put an electronic version of myself out there for other people to judge and dissect at their leisure? Something about today. It was just after 11pm, and I was out for a long walk, enjoying some good tunes on my discman and a large cup of tea, courtesy of Timmy Ho's, when I was suddenly blindsided by a surge of introspection/creativity. I do have these occasionally, but they most often manifest themselves in a desire to finger-paint. Such was not the case today (though some finger-painting could be very enjoyable right now). The sky was full of lightning, and rumbled deeply with thunder, but much to my dismay, there had been almost no rain (walking in the rain, when I have nowhere to be and don't have to worry about my hair or clothes getting damp, is one of my greatest joys). Consequently, an oppressive humidity was hanging in the air, causing shop windows to fog up and any skin I had exposed to glisten as though I'd been exercising vigorously rather than just strolling along. It's the kind of night tonight that makes everything around me - the sounds of my roommate in the next room, the soft breeze coming from my fan, and even the glow of my laptop monitor - seem very surreal. And maybe that's why today was the ideal day for this: because even now, as this post lengthens and the gentle tapping sounds of the keyboard fill my ears, it doesn't seem like this is really happening.

I'm still not sure what I want this site to be. My thoughts, as ridiculous as they often are? Accounts of my daily events, as I continue my journey toward what will almost certainly be the selling of my soul to some corporate superpower? A collection of dirty limericks, perhaps? Who knows. I imagine it will be some sort of mish-mash of these things (except the third - I much prefer sonnets). I'll post when the spirit moves me to do so. I hope that turns out to be often, but since my life is often in a state of general chaos and I rarely have any time to spare, I make no promises.

If you choose to read this on any sort of regular basis, then welcome to my life.