I'm Giving It The Old College Try

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Remember last week on Tuesday when I was sick in bed? Well, I am presently sucking back a Bolthouse Farms Berry Boost Fruit Smoothie, which contains 500% of my daily vitamin C requirement, in the hopes that it will help me make it through the workday. (That Bolthouse Farms mention? I promise that that was completely unsolicited. I am just a Bolthouse Farms lover and like to give away free advertising while I figure out how to afford a decent computer and buy new glasses when the lenses alone are approximately $125 each. I am nice that way).

This is my EIGHTH DAY with this blasted cold virus, and all I want to do physically is sleep, and I must stress "physically", because what this cold has done to my dreams over the last eight days is completely ungood psychologically. I sweat and roll around all night, and not in any hot heterosexual action kind of way but in a fighting-for-my-sanity kind of way. Here are a few examples from my illness-induced dreams:

I was a young man in college in the 1970s with a shaggy haircut who was told that he was failing out of school and then had the simultaneous realization that he was really a queer woman in the 1990s, which made him both transgendered and transchronological.

I was in a foreign country at a restaurant that served me raw human flesh. I ate it, rationalizing my choice with the "when in Rome" proverb and the fact that the meat came from free-range, organic humans. The meat was surprisingly supple.

An English man noticed an eagle hanging by its foot in midair. Oh, dear, he said, That bird's left side is completely obliterated, but its right side is still alive. What a horrible state. I looked up to see that the eagle was a siamese twin with a singular consciousness, and that it also had the heads of identical Englishmen, except that one of them was very corpsy and mangled.

The Palinode has had to shake me awake a couple of times when I have cried out in my sleep over being forced into deathly tunnels or strangling baby koalas. Yeesh.

The sleeping aspect of this cold is officially NOT WORKING OUT, which means that the being awake part of this cold is also officially NOT WORKING OUT. I cannot concentrate long enough to finish the pair of arm warmers I need finish for a customer or to work on the website design for another customer that I was going to finish this weekend or to put my freaking painkillers in my freaking purse because I HURT. From my head to my toes, I ache as though I have been on a forced march while dragging supplies through mud for three days; I am a serf at the feet of my viral lord. Every muscle in me is asking Why, why, why are we sitting up? We should be lying down! And resting! Even if it means we must dream of cuddling into the warm underbelly of a giant mother tarantula.

Despite this, I was planning on entertaining you with a photograph of what I was up to one year ago. I receive a Photojojo Photo Time Capsule in an e-mail every two weeks, which includes the most interesting photos from one year ago from my Flickr account, and I thought surely this would save me from having to use the aching rock I have attached to this stiff stump of a neck of mine. Do you know what Photojojo told me I was up to around this time last year? This:

I was doing dishes. And then you know what?

I got wrinkly fingers while I washed those dishes.

My life is freaking genius.

After work, I am going to the drugstore to pick up a cold remedy so that I can start hacking away at some of the projects on which I am working, but I am not sure which one will do the trick. Benylin 1 Cold & Flu gets me stoned (in a very nice way, mind you, but not one that is conducive to getting anything done, like figuring out what the first half of my sentence was so that I can say the second half without looking like I have gone catatonic), and I cannot take anything that has echinacea in it, because I am allergic to it. Any suggestions?

This Schmutzie's got stuff to accomplish, and it is not going to happen without some fine pharmaceuticals.

Labels: the dreams, the here and now, the photographs

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If I Remained Unconscious, I Would Be Brilliant

Monday, March 17, 2008

On Saturday morning, I woke up wondering who had replaced my brain with that of a person who had not drunk herself into oblivion with Greeneggsandtam the night before, because the brain I woke up with was doing some philosophizing hitherto unseen around these parts after much beer and wanton drooling onto the pillows.

The reason for my confusion was this:
The last of my dreams was nothing but the sound of my own voice delivering a lecture that was an explanation of humankind's fondness for symmetry. My dream-self postulated that symmetrical images could be repeated endlessly without break, a visual eternity of sameness, and I extrapolated that the symmetry we often seek in human beauty is at least partially spawned by the desire to see ourselves within the context of the infinite rather than that of our finite physical lives. I concluded that our desire for symmetry, both in object and in human form, drew from the same well as our desire to seek the divine.

And then, I snapped awake with a chunk of Onion's fur in my eye and a carpet of blech that was self-replicating on my tongue.

That was more like it.

Labels: the dreams

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Johanna Spyri's Heidi and Me

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

When I was a kid, I had a record of the story Heidi.

I should really just start a whole longstanding series called "When I Was A Kid", because half of the crap I write starts off with those five words. If white, suburban childhoods of depressed, schizo-affective gender-queers are popular right now, I could make a mint.

A-hem. Anyway.

When I was a kid, I had a vinyl record of Johnanna Spyri's story, Heidi. (I threw "vinyl" in there to clarify "record", because I am starting to feel that I sometimes sound like my grandfather when he would use a word like "stoneboat" and then not bother to clue in the young'uns as to what the hell such a thing was). I had already read the book, which was a musty, yellowed copy with gold leaf on the spine from my mother's childhood library, but I do not remember much of the story past the middle, because I read the first half several times in my effort to finish the damn thing.

I had a problem with Heidi. I found her intensely difficult to like. Even I, a child who drew up elaborate fantasies of kidnappings and parental death and natural catastrophes, could not feel any sympathy for the complete tragedy that was her life. In fact, I came to want bad things to happen to her.

Since I was raised a pacifist, I felt terribly guilty about my Heidi hate. I knew that she was a tragic character who was being unfairly tossed from situation to situation and that it was even more unfair of me to hate her for her seeming helplessness, but really? All that just fueled me on. Not only did I not like her, but I felt guilt about not liking her and hated her more for the guilt she inspired. That all added up to my being even more disgusted at this wet kleenex of a character.

Maybe it was part of my process of learning passionate emotions and how to deal with them, but I became obsessed with the vinyl record version of the story, and in particular, the part of the story during which Heidi's stress drives her to sleepwalk off the end of a dock. The voice of Heidi on the record was obviously done by an adult in a ridiculous falsetto, so, on top of her annoying perpetual tragedy, she sounded like a pubescent Mickey Mouse.

At one point in the story, she sleepwalks down a hill to a dock over the lake. Her guardians are there but will not stop her, because it is more important to let a sleepwalker nearly drown herself than it is to attempt to save her life, don't you know. I always hoped that she would walk off the end and drown, but, much to my disappointment, someone always stepped in to stop her. What saved the scene for me was the ludicrous scream that would erupt just before Heidi was to possibly meet with a mortal end, and it became my thing for a while to play that scene over so I could hear her scream and then lift the record player needle just before she was saved so that I could imagine her drowning in an icy mountain lake in the middle of the night.

I was such a sweet child.

The satisfaction that would well up inside me each time I lifted the needle post-scream was very nearly perverse, and someone in my house must have picked up on it, because that record disappeared shortly thereafter.

What sparked this memory is a recurring dream that I have had for three nights running. It is in drawn pictures much like what you would find in old Dick and Jane readers, only with more colour in the background, and it looks as though I am flipping through pages so that the images move but are jerky. In the dream, a blonde little girl wanders down a hill, trips over a rock, and rolls head-over-heels into deep water and drowns. As soon as the little girl hits the water, I can hear my own voice laughing heh, heh, heh to myself, as though everything has gone according to plan.

Frankly, I think Heidi and I have some work to do on our relationship.

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Labels: the dreams, the past

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The February Crazy Makes Itself Known

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

I spent half the night crisscrossing the line between sleep and wakefulness as I was plagued by stupid dreams with stupid plot lines.

Actually, the irritating dream thing started not last night but the night before when I dreamt that I was holding a friend's baby. It had an abnormally small head covered in dark hair with pinhole eyes and one gargantuan tooth jutting out of its lower jaw. It started nuzzle at my breast, and I said No, little guy, that won't do, and then he latched on through my shirt anyway and bit my nipple really hard with that abomination of a tooth of his. I spent the rest of that dream annoyed and embarrassed about the wet circle of baby spit on my shirt over my left nipple.

I will give you a short synopsis of last night's dream's adventures in a list, because this bitch just goes on and on:

I visited a friend in another city, and she threw this huge, obnoxious party the first night I was there.

Her mother built me a remarkable free-standing tower out of potato chips much like a house of cards, and then it collapsed, and I had to spend a bunch of time cleaning the mess of crumbs out of the carpet.

I woke up alone in the morning, looking around at a dingy living room, and I said I feel like I'm in a Harold Pinter play, and no one's excited to see me. I have no idea what that means. I have never even read any Pinter.

A man told me that he could help me to makeover my image, and then he proceeded to tell me that although I have young face, my neck looks ten years older.

Someone put on an outdoor breakfast potluck buffet in honour of my visit, but I hate eating outside, did not know anyone, and was too hung over to enjoy it.

I went back to my friend's house to clean up, but the main floor had been cleared of all its contents. I looked out the back door, and some friends had loaded all the furniture, ornaments, and whatnot, including my clothing, into the back of a truck. They were going to take it all away and clean it as a surprise. When I freaked out about my clothing, they laughed at how uptight I was and drove away, but I knew that the expensive items I had brought along would be destroyed. Jerks.

Last night's dreams completely confounded me until That Girl figured out what was going on. Apparently, each time something annoying or fucked up happened, it was because someone was trying to be nice or helpful to me. That Girl said, It sounds like you really need to hermit yourself away for awhile. No freaking kidding.

I have really enjoyed the things I have gone out of the apartment to do with people lately, but I find every excursion exhausting. The February Crazy is upon me.

What is the February Crazy, you ask? Well, it is a lovely period of time that occurs annually each February. Its symptoms vary but may include any or all of the following:

Irritability. Did you say something to me? Because that would be wrong. Are you standing anywhere in my vicinity without obvious purpose? Because that would be wrong, too. Have you walked by me a hundred times rather than turning whatever you are doing into one trip? Because that would be very, very wrong. Did you ask me how I am doing? Seething, thank you.

Strong urges to run away and join the circus. These urges may also be experienced as desires to become a hippie or ride the rails or do a stint in a nunnery. It is best to avoid these urges by crawling under a blanket and drinking an entire bottle of wine.

Feelings of guilt. In this case, another symptom, irritability, can often be used to overcome the sense that one has fallen terribly short of others' expectations, as irritability is usually quite strong during the February Crazy.

Sudden weeping. When irritability cannot overcome feelings of guilt, sudden emotional outbursts are common. Do not be alarmed. Enjoy wine liberally and hide in a warm bath.

Vivid dreams that are emotionally upsetting. See above.

Actions contradict emotions. An individual suffering from the February Crazy may make broad statements about the futility of life and the need to hermit and then will be seen out in public yucking it up. In public, treat an individual with the February Crazy with a gentle hand lest they fall to irritability or weeping. They do not know why they are out in the world, either, and are likely to be easily confused.

Tonight, I am choosing a blanket and a bottle of beer to curl up with while I watch hours of "Law & Order" to divert my attention away from the fact that my system is still trying to deal with the loaf of garlic bread I ate on Sunday. Yes, I said LOAF. The February Crazy also has some slightly less common symptoms, such as the overconsumption of underbaked, white flour products slathered in cheap margarine and garlic powder.

(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)

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Labels: the crazy, the dreams, the lists

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#827: Dreams And Waking

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

I had a dream last night that the party balloon population rose suddenly, and once their air had escaped or they popped, their deflated bodies draped all over the trees and smothered them, which caused the deforestation of most of northern Europe.

And then, we were petting slugs, which looked like over-sized maggots, and we could put our fingers straight through them as though they were clouds, and it did not hurt them at all.

Later, we ate fancy burgers laden with flower petals instead of lettuce, and they felt velvety on my tongue.

The only part I really did not like was the part during which the Palinode kept making me smell his finger after rubbing it in different places. He thought that it was hilarious, but I found it to be highly disgusting, so I said Can't I just go roll around in that dead rabbit over there instead? I pointed at a rabbit whose guts were falling from its ribs like a beached whale. Sure, he said.

I woke up to a cat nuzzling my chest as though looking for a nipple, and I thought Will this day ever end?

Labels: the dreams

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Friday, May 4, 2007

#700: UPSTART TOOTH

Occasionally, but rarely, a particular tooth in the back of my mouth will feel as though it has raised itself up. It is not painful, but there it is, taller than it was yesterday, taller than the tooth in front of it. I bite down crookedly, landing my chomp on it, and the meeting of my other teeth follows like a series of falling dominoes clacking together in sequence.

It feels as though it must mean something; it is telling. Of what it is telling, I have no idea, so I stick my tongue in its crevices and think about what it might imply. It is dreamlike, this tooth and its movements, with its measure of foreboding.

I have dreamt of teeth only a few times in thirty-four years. I have dreamt that they were rotten or became worms or were loose, but I never dreamt this particular scenario. Dream dictionaries tell me that to dream of teeth means poor health, embarrassment, a feeling of powerlessness, a bad business situation, that lies are being told, that your words are coming back to haunt you, that you are afraid of losing someone close to you. I am hoping that this particular prediction is not true: "Dreaming that one tooth is longer than the others portends sad news." But then, of course, I am not one to bet on the veracity of Glamour magazine's oneiromancy.

I am fascinated by Genesis P-Orridge's teeth. If you watch this video of P-Orridge from August 2006, you will see solid gold teeth glittering from behind siliconed lips. When I see those teeth, I am reminded that I have thought about complete tooth removal since I was five years old. When I lost my first tooth, I suddenly took notice of all the tooth loss in the world. It was like how when you meet someone for the first time, and they start to show up where you are all over the place. I was missing teeth, my grandparents were missing teeth, my dad had a false tooth where a hockey puck had popped out the original. Even then, I wanted all my teeth gone for good or have them stay perfect forever, because I saw a long life of working to save continually deteriorating teeth marked with numerous bouts with dentists. I wanted none of it. I was probably the only five-year-old who hoped for a full set of dentures at an early age.

Teeth are the part of my body that give it away. They give away its mechanics in away that my warm, blood-filled flesh does not. They are solid and hard, which makes them foreign, and they are problematic; it is as though they were poorly engineered for the bodies to which they are attached.

The Palinode counselled me to write about love when I asked him for inspiration earlier today, but here I am writing about teeth. Should this bother me? That I am writing about teeth, which portend nastiness all 'round, when my intent was to write about love? Today, I choose to let that lie.

I have no interest lately in pursuing deeper meaning. I find it troublesome and tiresome. It knits worry and insecurity into the simplest scenes. I am on vacation from caring.

So, my tooth is up today; tomorrow it will be down. I will have forgotten about its rise to prominence until the next time it pokes itself up, and then I will touch it with my tongue, press my teeth together to feel the awkward fit, and wonder if it is the harbinger of certain doom once again. It is almost boring, this tooth routine. It is like the salt I eat: I know that salt makes my food taste good, but I don't want to contemplate its origins and possible symbolic meaning every time I pick up the salt shaker.

Maybe I will have this tooth pulled and replace it with corundum, putting an end to this contemplation altogether. I will have it painted annually in the year's fashionable colour, and when I am dug up in a thousand years, archaeologists will create for it a ritual purpose, and I will be named a queen of my people.

Labels: the dreams, the miscellany, the past

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Sunday, April 29, 2007

#694: THREE CUPS OF COFFEE SHOULD UNGLUE ME FROM THIS CHAIR

1. This is entry 694, which means that after writing six more entries, I will be out of the 600s. I hate the number six, and my obsessive side, which I prefer to envision as an ugly and nagging troll of a homunculus, has been suffering a facial tic throughout the last 95 entries.


2. It is annoying me that after this entry there will be SIX more to write.


3. This obsession with the number six is likely a misdirection of my anxiety about my LEEP procedure (Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure) on Wednesday morning.


4. Did you know that sexual intercourse should be avoided for three weeks after a LEEP? Fecking hell.


5. Today, though, I am focusing on ways to make my home environment pleasant, so that on Wednesday, when I drag myself home from the hospital, hoping that I'm not the one in ten who is blessed with post-surgical hemmoraging, I can just kick back, take pain meds, and watch bad afternoon television from my bed.


6. Ooh, maybe I will even liveblog Oprah, she who aggravates me so. If she tongue-kisses the ass of celebrity or gives tons of unnecessary free crap away to makeover fresh audience members or tells people how brave they are for doing what any ethical person would do, she'll just be making it easy for me.


7. Where am I going with this? Right. I am going to be productive and clean the apartment, pick up some easy-to-prepare comfort food, change all the cat litter, and wash the cat hair out of the bedding.


8. All of those activities listed in the above point will happen right after I finish a bodum full of coffee, manage to wrench my butt from this chair, and get up the energy to stand in the shower for a whole seven minutes. It could happen.


9. No, it really could.


10. But first, I have to kick myself for complaining about cancer that I may or may not have when someone who knows it all too well may have a recurrence of it and is going under the knife to find out. Go visit Citizen of the Month and lend Sophia your support.


11. I'm nervous anyway. My hands won't stay still. I have to type or eat or smoke to keep them busy, because if they are busy, then I am occupied with real things aside from fear of what may or may not be cancer on a cervix to which I have no attachment.


12. Perhaps it is because I have been reading stories along the lines of Fluid Pudding's birth stories and TB's very recent birthing experience that I was dreaming last night that I was having my pubic hair completely shaved off. Whoever was doing it for me was doing an extremely thorough job. I looked like a newborn.
    
    Each successive dream following it had some part of me being shaved: armpits, legs, my head. When the clippers were brought to my head, the idea was to have a guard on them so that I would still have an inch of hair. The guard fell off the clippers, and I was shorn to the skin. Just before I woke up, I had a dream in which I was completely glabrous.
    
    When I woke up a couple of hours ago, I had a strong urge to break out the hair shaver and give myself a good going over, because I was mostly bald for three years once and never felt better, but I held off. Why? Because I work in a professional office and have a boss who knows that I've gone on brain medication. I wouldn't mind some extra time off, but I would like it to be paid time off like a vacation and not paid time off like unemployment cheques.


13. So, I am going to settle for a soak in the bath with a pumice stone and then a shower.


14. I am also going to brush my teeth in the shower, because I have found that when I do that, all my personal cleaning is done at once, and I get to have that thoroughly wet-from-the-shower feeling along with the minty-fresh-mouth feeling. It's twice as satisfying, and you also don't have to worry about getting toothpaste on your shirt.


15. Go look at the new videos and the new links I've posted. And then, GO VOTE FOR ME if you have not already. The voting links are at the top of this column.


16. I have got to go get this bathing thing underway. Seriously. I started this list at 9 a.m., and it's now noon.


17. But before I go, I have a question for you: why am I fine with not shaving my legs at all until I know that I have put my feet up in stirrups for a gynecologist? I am very sure that she has seen all kinds of ladies, including the back-to-nature types who are as sasquatchy as I am, but I think of my hairy legs looking all the more stumpy and hairy for sticking out between my ankle socks and a backless hospital gown, and I just want the hair gone. I don't want to have to think about the gynecologist's ears being so close and intimate with my pasty, stovepiped, hirsuteness.


18. Do you like my rooster?

    

Labels: the body, the dreams, the lists

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Monday, April 2, 2007

#677: HOUSEKEEPING, ETC.

Who changes her template every three months? I do! I do! The Palinode laughs at me every time I do it, because I will lead him to the computer and say See? Isn't it just perfect? I think it's my favourite design yet, and then he replies That's exactly what you said last time. And he's right. Every time I redesign this place, it's my favourite design ever. This one? It's the best one I've ever had. I will keep it this way for an entire year. I swear.

Aside:

As I type this, I am dropping large penne noodles covered in oily dressing all over my lap, chair, and keyboard. Do you know how hard it is to manipulate a fork into transporting oily, rubbery pasta to your mouth while you are typing things with one hand that come out like this: A am typpinhy this with one hangd? Very hard.

It reminds me of that time in grade nine orienteering (institutionalized torture of neophyte highschoolers for the enjoyment of their older peers, for those of you who don't know) when we were made to stand in long boy-girl-boy-girl lines in the gym with toothpicks clenched in our teeth. The idea was that you had to take a lifesaver from the toothpick in mouth of the person behind you with your toothpick and then pass that lifesaver from your toothpick to the person's in front of you. The older kids were all laughing, because ha ha, it looked like the gym was filled with a four hundred kid strong make-out orgy. I thought the game would kill me, really and truly, because I had never so much as kissed a boy before, and here was some six-footer two inches from my five-foot self doing his best to take an orange candy that had fallen against my lips.

The point is that he was tall and I was short and frozen like stone with abject fear, so the endeavor was awkward as all get out, like eating oily pasta salad while typing and looking at a computer screen, only without the abject fear.

So, yes, I have spiffed this place up yet again. I wasn't going to, but then I was inspired after I created a header image for the Palinode. It got the itch started again, and the only way I know of scratching is to get out my camera, the scanner, and Photoshop to see what I can do. Please let me know if something is not functioning properly for you, because although I checked this thing in different browsers, I was more than a little high on codeine and/or muscle relaxants and/or beer when I did it, so I may have overlooked some things. Or a lot of things. My weekend is kind of a hazy mish-mash of actual memories and vivid dreams, and I haven't quite pulled them apart yet.

Another aside:

I had this heartbreaking dream last night that I was walking down the street with Abigail. The weather was cold and damp, and I suddenly realized that it was fall! Fall! When the last thing I remembered was just before anything began to grow in spring! How did this happen?! I yelled. I didn't even get to see the goddamned buds on the trees! Where are the fucking leaves?! How did I miss all of spring and summer? There is no life left for me anymore. Abigail patted my shoulder and tried to reassure me that spring would come again and that there would be other summers, but I slumped my shoulders in defeat. If I could not relish the warmer months, let alone remember them, what was the point if I was only going to be aware of the cold, dark months that break my will year after year?

I know. Real cheery. Something tells me that although the anti-depressant I've been on since January seems to be working, I'm still a tad anxious about my seasonal depression.

Where was I? Oh, yes. On top of redesigning this place over the weekend, I also bought my own domain for Schmoetry. For years and years I have written poetry and loved poetry and then tried to break up with poetry only find myself jotting things down on slips of found paper again, and I thought that it was about time to come right out and say that me and poetry are kind of official now. We're not quite married, but we make out a lot and like the same books. We're going steady, I guess.

And, the last thing I have to tell you is that I have been slowly updating my Favourite Entries section. I've just been sticking whatever I like into the list, but if you think there are entries that I should put in there that aren't there yet, let me know. I am constantly shocked by what you like, so I probably shouldn't be the only one choosing the best ofs.

Auf Wiedersehen, and good night.

Labels: the dreams, the metablogging, the past

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Friday, March 30, 2007

#673: I DREAM OF SWEATER VESTS

I have been dreaming that I am wearing sweater vests. Or rather, in every dream I have, another character inevitably points out that I am wearing a sweater vest, and when I look down at myself, behold!, I am wearing a sweater vest.

These sweater vests are not the cool kind. They are not so bad that they're good. If they are argyle, they are an ugly baby blue and forest green argyle. The sweater vests fit poorly. They are too tight in the body; the arm holes are stretched out or over-sized; they suck in too tightly at the waist, which makes me look strangely pudgy from the hips up. In one dream, it turned out that I was wearing the Palinode's dead uncle's sweater vest, and he wanted to change my name to Colin.

Last night, I dreamt about Onion, and he was wearing a tiny, cat-sized sweater vest that was green and brown with subtle cabling down his belly. I somehow knew that he was pleased with his attire.

As much as these dream sweater vests are unattractive and somewhat disturbing, I am finding myself desirous of one in my waking life. My dreams have sold me a sweater vest, and I want to take it back.

If you see someone on the street wearing an ugly sweater vest, and you find yourself wondering how they came to the conclusion that they should wear one, just know that there are many paths to the sweater vest, and be glad that your road has taken you on a different, sweater-vest-free route.

Labels: the dreams

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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

#645: BECAUSE NOW I AM CROTCHETY AND OLD FOR SOME REASON

On Thursday night, I managed to fall asleep without struggling against thoughts about the futility of existence, which was an accomplishment akin to climbing K2 or maintaining the gumption to continue to shave my legs semi-regularly during the warmer months. I slipped into dreams of people having bloody noses of which they were unaware. This is the new common thread in my dreams to replace the orphan koala baby, for which I am thankful, because my dream nipples were becoming too long and sore to continue as we were.

So, I was dreaming about this woman and was fascinated by the way the blood pooled along her upper lip rather than run straight down around her mouth. I was really getting into how the light in the room reflected off the outer edge where it bubbled up when I was jolted awake by someone yelling in the street.

Yo, negro! You in the red cap!

I slowly surfaced into consciousness and could hear shouting, banging, and packs of people running back and forth outside our apartment building. It sounded like a mini riot was going on out there. Nothing exciting has happened on our street since the city cleared out the crack house, so all the activity was a bit alarming. I threw on a housecoat and peered through a crack in the drapes.

You should come see this, I said to the Palinode. There are kids all over the street.

What's going on? he asked.

I don't know, but a whole bunch of them just chased another one down, and the white kids keep referring to the black kids as negro. When did that become okay?

A police car coasted down the block, and some of the kids moved closer to the house where the eye of the party was.

Oh good, there's a police car checking it out. I didn't want to have to be the one to call them. I think all those kids are high. When one kid says to another "Hey man, can you help me out?", they're usually asking about drugs, right?

I don't know, the Palinode said.

You really should come take a look, I said. I was now standing in the window with the curtains wide open, watching the street like it was television. I reminded myself of Helen Roper from "Three's Company". I wondered if I had any big, plastic jewellery to put on. They're all wearing those stupid over-sized clothes with the pants that drag in the mud. And they're ugly, too. Are teenagers usually ugly? Probably. Those sideways hats look stupid, too.

Why don't you go back to bed, hon?

Oh, no. This is way too interesting. Why didn't the cops break it up? We have fifty teenagers running all over the street at night, and the cops do nothing. If this were suburbia, all those kids would be going home to their parents.

Uh-huh.

What kind of parents do they have, anyway? When I was a teenager, mine wouldn't let me stay out this late at a party in this part of town.

Right.

I bet you they're all thugs. They're a gang. They're going to break into this building and steal people's stuff.

Yep.

When did this happen? When did I become that person who stands in the window wearing a ratty, old housecoat, complaining about the neighbourhood and what the kids are up to these days? I wish there were an exact moment, an event, something tangible I could point at or stick under glass with pins like a lepidopterist's butterfly.

Does anybody have a miniature garishly make-upped, smoking busybody in a housecoat that I can pin to some matting? I'm not sure why this character smokes, but she does. I would name her the Fumidus Rumor Helenum. She would make squawking noises from inside the display about how things just aren't like they used to be when she was young. Her mother was beautiful and they always dressed well and children respected their elders and almost no one was fat because they weren't lazy.

I should find some red press-on nails and a muumuu, perm my hair, and convince the Palinode that it's okay to smoke in the apartment. Then I could crab about kids in the neighbourhood in style.

Labels: the dreams, the here and now

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It's A Near Standstill At Work, Three Bad Things Happened Before 8:00 AM, And The Joy Nerve Ticklers

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Where I work, we have markedly different busy periods throughout the year. I have been told that this is the slowest. I was told that this was the slowest a few weeks ago when I asked about it. I asked about it because I thought that I we had descended into one of the slowest and least work intensive job environments I have ever experienced. I was wrong. It has steadily gotten slower and slower and slower and slower and slower. Get my point? It's slow. And it's not slow like that slightly wall-eyed kid in the fifth grade who thought that picking boogers out of his nose and then chasing you with them was still a fun activity held over from kindergarten. No. That kid had something going on, be it gross or not. This is the kind of slow where even balls of snot could entertain the least of us.

Today did not start out well at all. At 2:00 am, a loud and panicked-sounding banging woke the Fiery One and I up. My first thought was FIRE!, because this sort of false alarm used to happen much too frequently in our apartment building. Then I realized that it was a woman's voice yelling on the other side of the door. The Fiery One is much more intelligent upon waking at 2:00 am than I am, so he wisely told me not to open the door. He explained that she hadn't been banging on all the other doors that she had been running by in the hall and that there were no other sounds of commotion aside from her yelling. By this point, I had leapt from the bed and into the closet where I was trying to fumble my way into the Fiery One's housecoat. I'm not sure why, but every time we are woken up in the middle of the night by some possible calamity, my first instinct is to get dressed inside the closet. Our closet is small, and I never normally try to get dressed in there, but in case of fire, jump-in-the-closet is my first order of duty. Back to the yelling and banging girl . . . No sooner had it started than it stopped, so I stood by the window naked, looking down at the front steps of the building to see if anyone suspicious was going to run out. There was no fire, no bloody girl in a t-shirt screaming in the crusted remnants of front-yard snow, no man obviously suffering from some psychosis fleeing the building with a glinting weapon. There was just some chubby guy walking by on the sidewalk with a big slurpee cup and me standing cold and nippley by the window and knowing that my night of decent sleep was officially over.
At least the dreams Yelling-and-Banging Bitch woke me out of were boring ones best cut off at the root. When she woke me up, I was in the middle of a dream in which some guy, I think it was my Uncle Puck, had given me his debit card to pay for something, and I wouldn't take it. "No, you see, it's not signed. You have to put your signature there," I explained. He asked for a pen, and I said that that didn't work, he couldn't sign it now, because anyone could sign a blank debit card in front of me, but that wouldn't make it theirs. He seemed annoyed, so I explained that it didn't matter that we knew each other. The rules had to be the same for everyone. BANG! BANG! See? That was a horribly boring dream. And what was I doing being such a little rule-follower? Suddenly in my dreams I'm like those ladies at church with the A-line skirts who never say what they mean in case someone might disagree or never bother meaning anything at all.
There are actually three things that got today off to a bad start. I got so caught up in that part about the boring dream that I nearly forgot what is even worse than the first thing: bad thing number two. Bad thing number two happened when I went through the basket of laundry that I had brought up from the building's laundry room yesterday or the day before. I knew that I had washed my favourite pair of jeans and a black t-shirt with that load, but they weren't in the basket, so I ran down to the laundry room to check if they had been left in the dryer or something, but they weren't there either. I even checked the obscenely large pile of laundry on the floor of the bedroom. Nothing. They have been stolen! I was so angry at first, because I am really starting to get a hate-on for the people who live in that building with me, but then I just felt kind of sorry for myself. I liked those jeans and that t-shirt. They were bought with money I got for Christmas or my birthday, and they are items I can't really afford to replace. Also, I've lost a bunch of weight, and those were two of only a few items I have left that fit me flatteringly. Before I left for work, I taped up a note in the laundry room that asked the perpetrator to please leave the items in the laundry room when they were done using them. It also has illustrations of said articles with arrows pointing to my home-done alterations to the jeans that are easily identifiable. My co-tenants are an evil, awful lot.
The third thing that was bad was that my bus was several minutes late. It's too warm during the day to wear my heavier winter coat, so I wear my yellow, spring coat to the bus in the morning. It is still a bit on the chilly side at 7:30 am, but it only takes a few minutes for me to walk to my stop and wait. Today, though, the bus was quite a few minutes late. It was so late that I was able to not only smoke my usual cigarette but a second one and wonder about grabbing coffee at hole-in-the-wall across the street and wallow in my laundry theft. And then I got really cold and had to curse the hole in my left glove.
I suffered three evils today before it was even 7:45 am, so I took that as a guarantee that the rest of today would be great. Maybe I will find a $100 bill, or maybe when I get home the bathroom walls will magically be all fixed and I can have a decent shower. If karma renewed itself on a daily basis, days like today would be godsends, because I would totally win the lottery after a morning like mine if that were the case.

A lady just came up through the place where I work, and she had the most amazing clothing sense. She wore scarlet red and black plaid pants, a soft yellow mohair turtleneck, and a bright baby pink cardigan. She is the sweetest person I have had to joy to talk to all month, and I'm sure it's her sweetness that stops anyone from confronting her about lack of colour co-ordination. Also, just a second ago, this tiny little foreign student came to return a pencil grip that she had bought. She said the pencil grip was too big for her (the only words she managed to say were "too big", but I knew what she meant), so I couldn't help but glance at her hands. They were the hands of a small child. That was just simply ticklish to my joy nerve. (That sounded dirtier than I thought it would. If I ever accuse someone to their face of "tickling my joy nerve" here, I might get into trouble).

Bush is allowing gays to be fired for being gay now. This article incorrectly states that Bush is contradicting his own statements, but he is not. Bush said that he would “... [protect] federal employees against unlawful discrimination related to their sexual orientation.” If he changes the laws, then the discrimination is no longer unlawful, is it?

This made me laugh uproariously. I hope my neighbours aren’t home. “Savage Love”, thank you.

Edward Zubler, the inventor of the halogen lamp, has died at the age of 79.

Saskatchewan has almost stemmed its population loss problem. Give us a reason to stay other than that we know people here, and we will.

Are you going to kick the bucket anytime soon? Yes? Because there are two performance artists who need your corpse while it’s fresh.

Rooms full of impassioned Russian poets sounds dreamy to me. Imagining such a thing in Canada just seems funny.

This story is interesting to me because of the bizarre experiences I had a few years ago while taking Paxil. I would be going about my day, feeling pretty good, and then, while still feeling pretty good, WHAM!, I would suddenly think to myself “I should kill myself”. The Paxil kept me in a decent state, and I liked it at the time, but these thought were unnerving. There were no warning emotions like sadness to make sense of it. For most of the time that I was on the drug, this thought occurred on about a twice-weekly basis. Luckily, I had it together enough to shrug it off.

I have never before heard of quolls. They're kind of cute. And awfully endangered.

The world’s tiniest elevator has been created. It is only two-and-a-half nanometers high.

AIDS rates in Swaziland are the highest in the world – infection in adults is at 38.6%, and in some areas the infection rate for women ages 19 to 30 is as high as 49.5%.

Labels: the dreams, the here and now, the miscellany

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A New Template (Again), The NSB, And Stupid, Stupid Dreams

Sunday, March 14, 2004

I have a whole new look! It’s a strange thing for me to do after Mirabile complimented me on Friday night for what has now become my old template, but such is life. I hope you enjoy this one as much, Mr. Visu, because I worked darn hard on it.

Saudi Arabia will hold its first municipal elections in October.

President Vladimir Putin is expanding his country’s strategic ties with China in military sales and economic co-operation. Russia’s tensions with the West have been rising, especially now that they feel there is a lot of unwarranted negative media being used to sway westerners’ opinions regarding Putin’s re-election.

Baldness may finally be cured, at least in the rodent world.

China has amended its constitution to include human rights and the right to private property.

The Fiery One and I went to an art gallery with a couple of friends this afternoon, because there was an art exhibition going on there that had been through my home city which I had heard a lot about. Yum. The exhibition was entitled “Soundtracks” and was split into three parts: “Come a Singing!”, “See Hear!”, and “Re-Play”. The titling really needed some work, but despite the folksy sound of the wording, most of it was fantastic. The best find of the afternoon was the Nihilist Spasm Band which hailed from Ontario. I could have sat around listening to the Nihilist Spasm Band all afternoon. How is it that such fantastic political, artistic, musician types flew under my radar for so long? I was listening to the music on these horribly misshapen headphones, having to press the right one against my ear so I could hear them in stereo, and staring around this large white room whose walls were lined with bizarrely shaped instruments, most of them stringed. The members of the Nihilist Spasm Band created many of their own instruments, seemingly out of whatever they could find. The sounds meeting my ears were often discordant, cacophonous, but elements of it would rise up and I would get lost in following the rhythm of the thread. This stupid gallery tour guide was leading a whopping tour of two through the NSB part of the exhibit, and she told them that “...the NSB were more political than anything else, as you can tell by their terrible music”. I wonder what it takes to get to be a closing-your-mind, forcing-your-opinion tour guide in an art gallery. Apparently an art degree and smugness are all you need to be a cultural mediator.

36,000 chickens are going to be killed on one British Columbian farm with the arrival of the bird flu.

The Spanish Socialist Workers Party won 96% of the votes in the recent election in Spain, promising to bring home their troops stationed in Iraq.

The California Supreme Court has ordered an immediate halt to same-sex weddings in San Francisco and will wait to hear arguments in May or June.

Worried about being single forever? Well, you don’t have to be. There is a website that offers to help pair you up with another single as a backup plan if neither of you is married in twenty years.

My dreams have been extremely boring lately. I really shouldn’t complain, because I didn’t have dreams that I could remember for what felt like a long time, but the ones I am remembering now are getting lame. It’s the same thing every night. I dream I might be pregnant, but I am not eager to find out either way and seem to take it in stride. I dream that I am looking down at myself and I am wearing a flimsy, grass-green shirt that buttons down the front. My breasts are very perky and my nipples point very noticeably through the material. I am not embarrassed by this. I dream about the hang-dog face of a young man in his early twenties. He is sad but sweet and cute in a homely kind of way, and I wish I could help him. Sometimes I dream bits and flashes of white, white skin. It’s all quite physical, more about indulgence of the senses than anything else, but the repetition is getting old. I keep thinking that maybe if I figure out what the hell it means, it will stop, but when I try to look deeper, I see nothing there. Any suggestions? Maybe eating a lot of cheese right before going to bed will throw curve into my dream world.

The story behind Marcus Wesson’s mass killing seems to be a complicated one to say the least.

Here is an interesting article that discusses the possible legal ramifications of accepting “civil union” as an alternative to marriage. No, really, it’s interesting.

Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks in Madrid.

Tehran barred the International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear inspectors on Friday, March 12th, and this has raised international concerns regarding their possible nuclear weapons program.

Labels: the dreams, the here and now, the metablogging

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Hair Removal (Or Not), A Dream, And Hooters

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

I found this on cyrenity’s site, and just had to share it with all of you – gay penguins. I keep thinking how desperate those two were to try to hatch a rock.

Too cool. Zoom in on everyday things.

Apparently, Joy Adamson, of Born Free fame, was not the sweet lady portrayed in the film. I remember watching Born Free when I was a kid, and I even learned the theme song. I wanted to grow up and be as strong and noble and courageous and change-effecting as Ms. Adamson, but now I will have to find someone else who is strong and noble and courageous and change-effecting.

I shaved my armpits this morning. To many of you, this doesn’t seem to mean much. If you are a male, you probably assume that I shave my armpits, and if you are a female, armpit shaving has probably become such an ingrained part of your rituals of physical upkeep that you don’t think of it so much as assume it. Actually, none of you, male or female, probably gives any thought at all to whether or not I shave my armpits and how often I do it. Since you have been thinking so little about it, I will tell you all about this hair issue of mine.
When I was in highschool, I shaved regularly, both my underarms and legs. I usually did it every second or third day when the stubble would get really uncomfortable. Looking back, I realize that the only reason I did shave so often was that I went to a boarding school where the girls had to wear navy jumpers, and so my legs were exposed a good portion of the time. After graduation, this routine fell by the wayside. At first I found myself shaving my armpits regularly and leaving my legs go until I wanted to wear shorts or a skirt or the leg hair became too easily visible to the unwary eye. This carried on until I was twenty, a time when the things that dictated my hair removal changed markedly. I began dating a granola hippy type whose circle of hippy friends welcomed me with open arms. Why shave when those around you are woolly and unashamed of it? I felt brave and wild and a little dirty. It was very alluring this conscious decision to fuck those who would have me be ashamed of my natural state. Any razors left in the house were for the shaving of pilly sweaters only, furry armpits and legs aside.
Despite my pride in what felt like a gutsy approach to my femininity, when that relationship ended and I drifted away from the hippy crowd, my body hair became more of an issue. My next boyfriend was relatively okay with the hair, but most other men were less than enthused and often showed stifled disgust when they caught an accidental look at my hirsute ankle. Most of the women I knew had similar responses. My mother caught sight of my exposed ankle once and had to cover her mouth to quell her gag reflex. That reaction was so ridiculously out of proportion to the situation that I openly laughed at her, but ever after I held that image of her in my mind and took more care to cover up what had by then become my dirty little secret.
From about the age of twenty-two on, I developed a semi-regular routine of shaving my armpits whenever the hair growth threatened to make shaving difficult if left unchecked for too much longer, and leg-shaving took place approximately once or twice a month and was based on whether or not my leg hair was determined enough to weave its way through the fabric of my stockings. This habit grew simply out of laziness. From the ages of about twenty-three to twenty-seven, I was mostly single, if you don’t count some one-off lustful encounters and a four-month stint with someone I did not even feel like I was dating; since I didn’t really care one way or the other about my hairiness, and no one else was looking, and I did not tend to wear revealing clothing anyway, I just let the damn stuff grow as it would, for the most part, and stayed covered. Aesthetically speaking, I have to admit, my leg and armpit hair does nothing for me, as my hair is quite thick and dark and my skin is very pale, but laziness won out. It won out so regularly and for such lengths of time that my razors grew deep orange rust stains on their blades and developed layers of soap scum.
In recent months, this issue of my body hair has become a much bigger deal to me, and I am not sure why. I notice it constantly. Maybe it is because I have been allowing it its full growth for a whole year now, maybe it is that my body hair has become somewhat thicker in recent years, maybe it is my slow realization that a good number of the women shilling facial creams and other beauty products on television and in magazines are younger than me now, but I want to be rid of it. No, regular shaving won’t do it. If I shave in the morning, my legs are bristly by evening, and I am just not fastidious enough to keep up with it on a daily basis. My armpits have a small enough surface area and are easy enough to get at that I have started shaving them on a once-weekly basis. Silly as it is, I feel a small sense of accomplishment over this and wear smaller t-shirts proudly, confident in the knowledge that no tendrils of my underarm growth will be peeking out if I raise my arms. From the waist up, I look acceptably feminine in terms of our culture: my moustache is burnt away by depilatory creams, my eyebrows are plucked, and my armpits are as smooth and hairless as a ten-year-old’s (today, that is). From the waist down, it is a different story: there is too much work involved in shaving, too much pain in certain other methods of hair removal, and summer is not yet here with shorts and skirts to coerce me into pruning my unruly growth. But still, there it sits, and I want rid of it. I am woman, hear me wince at the thought of waxing.

The world is running out of oil. You know it, I know it, we all know it, so how come this is the first article I’ve come across recently that speaks directly about it?

I don’t know how much I like the idea of setting out to destroy and entire species of fish by sending out a genetically modified terminator. It’s creepy.

I haven’t read Please Don’t Kill the Freshman by Zoe Trope. It’s one of those books that I glance at whenever I see it, but for some reason have never opened. After reading this review, though, I might.

My dreams are still coming along well. My lack of decent dreaming over the last few months is definitely being made up for. As an example, here is a dream from a couple of nights ago:
I was wealthy and had no need of a regular job, so I worked with different charities to bring good into the world. For this one particular charity (it’s purpose was unclear to me, even in the dream) I had come up with a unique way to raise funds and awareness. I had decided to put together a temporary zoo of small exotic animals from around the world. People would pay to visit the zoo, and then there would be an expensive dinner where the elite could sit and dine in a room whose walls were lined with the cages of these exotic animals. I was unpacking a crate that contained three Burmese tree rabbits, which I had never seen before (in fact, nobody ever has, because my dream self made them up). The Fiery One was enchanted by them. They were smaller than your average rabbit and had the softest, medium-length, greyish-brown fur I have ever felt. They were also floppier than your average rabbit, like they had all this loose skin or something. I fell in love with them, because they were so people-friendly and affectionate. (It only occurred to me later upon waking that importing exotic animals is just not acceptable, even if it is in the name of charity. Those poor Burmese tree rabbits).

There is something really funny about the fact that sites like Friendster, who are there to connect people together, can't even keep their own popularity up.

This is a great entry from anyone’s any. She wrote so well about something I struggle with every day.

When I started writing this entry yesterday morning, it was about 7am, which means that it was still dark out. This means that when I was sitting here in front of the window at the computer with the lights on, I was easily visible from the office building across the street. I noticed that a couple of the people who work in that building were there early, so if they happened to glance out the window, there I would be. Just then, the Fiery One came into the room, and I referred to my breasts as hooters, which suddenly seemed like the funniest breast reference ever. Partially, I think the hilarity rose from the fact that I had been sitting there topless for over an hour and knew full well that anyone across the street could see me. I wanted to write “hooters” across my chest at that point, because as funny as it was to think of people going home after work and telling their friends and spouses about this naked girl in the apartment building across the street, it was even funnier to think of people going home after work and telling their friends and spouses about this naked girl in the apartment building across the street who had “hooters” written across her chest. I am not normally an exhibitionist, but yesterday apparently called for it.

So, since it’s here now, what do you think of my new layout? I still don’t know much about html, so I worked very hard to construct this new look for myself. I rather like it, if I do say so myself.

Labels: the body, the dreams, the miscellany

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A Cool Dream, A Thought Loop, And Five Happy Things

Saturday, February 7, 2004

"Call This English Lit?" explains one professor's viewpoint on the use of pornography in a university classroom.

N'kisi is one smart parrot.

Spalding Gray, the author, has been missing for weeks, and it is feared that this is due to suicide, which he felt was destined to be his end.

For the longest time, my dreams were so bland and forgettable, but lately things have been picking up. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream that was all about perspective. At least I think it was all about perspective, but when it comes to dreams, almost anything could be true. Over and over I would be facing another person in a room full of people. It was apparent that we were having a conversation, but there was no sound. Part way through the conversation, my physical perspective would change. It was like rotating on a plate. My physical body would stay where it was, and my second body, the non-corporeal self, would rotate around and become one with the other person. I could see through their eyes, feel their hair on their head, the clothing on their body. This would only last for a short while, and then I would rotate back to my own body, where I would find myself unable to operate only from my own perspective. I was then of two minds – theirs and mine. This happened several times, and by the end of the dream I was tiring of my constant state of duality.

Father Ryan, a Catholic priest in Toronto, stands in direct opposition to the Vatican's position on same-sex marriage.

I keep hearing warnings about eating fish, and then I hear that those warnings are overly paranoid, and then I hear this. I say, eat less fish, maybe once or twice a month, and not when you are pregnant. That seems sound.

Scroll down this page to see pictures of some of my favourite things.

I have been in the midst of a crisis for weeks now, and I keep hoping it will fade away on its own, but it is being very persistent. It is nothing too serious, really. It is just one of those garden variety what-have-I-accomplished-and-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life crises. I hate it when I get hit with this kind of thing, because there are always a ton of things I can find to aid in my self-deprecation. What did it today, what really made me start dwelling on it, was brunch at a friend’s parents’ house this morning. Brunch is usually a good idea, as far as I’m concerned. It includes all the greatness of breakfast foods like eggs and bacon and the like, and it also includes a wide range of other foods such as shaved ham, salads, and cream puffs. You can really get a lot of bang for this unnecessary extra mealtime. Our friend’s parents put out an excellent spread. They always have these egg/cheese/bread things, called UFOs for their flying-saucer shape, and my mouth delights in their salty goodness.
Brunch seemed to be going really well. Good food, good company..... and then the missus told us that she is retiring soon, which we all likely thought was a long way off for us, but it’s not, because she used to think that and that was like yesterday. And then it finally came home to me that my own mother is retiring at the end of June, and that she’s almost sixty. My mind, not content to stop at the simple understanding of the fact of my mother’s retirement, raced on an on..... my mother’s going to be sixty soon, which means that if I got pregnant and had a kid within the next year, my parents would be eighty by the time my kid was twenty, and twenty years ago my parents were forty, which isn’t so different, but in that same amount of time they are going to be really old and maybe close to death, and if I do have a kid soon, I probably won’t have the time to do stuff like write and make stuff, and all those female writers ended up doing most of their writing when their kids left home, which means that I could be in my fifties and just getting started, and does that mean I might feel unaccomplished for another twenty years?..... am I destined to.....
It did not get really intense for me until this afternoon after we had already come back home. Now, though, after writing about it for a while, my anxiety is beginning to wane. This is good. There is no sense in wasting an entire Saturday neurotically fidgeting with a thought loop.

Syd Solomon, 86, was a prominent abstract painter (that is, until he died, of course).

Spy stuff never ceases to be cool.

These made me laugh and laugh. They're oil paintings. Of sock puppets. Expressing different emotions. Really.

I don't have a cellular phone, nor do I have any need for one at this time in my life, but SMS (Short Messaging Service) is working itself in all over the place. SMS looks like this - M$ULkeCrZ (which means "miss you like crazy) - and it is fucking annoying.

Due to the bird flu, Kentucky Fried Chicken has turned to fish in Vietnam. “Kentucky Fried Fish” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

To prove how much better I am feeling, here is a list of good things about today:

1. I am wearing a fabulous pair of Dickies. They are black with a hot pink stripe down the outside of each leg, and they make me terribly happy.
2. I got to eat UFOs, and my belly is all chubby from the salt.
3. Gordon, the rabbit, has not eaten anything bad like books or the rug all evening, which makes me realize exactly why he’s the best pet ever.
4. I bought a book of Sylvia Plath’s poetry this afternoon with a gift card from Christmas, which means that the book was essentially free, and owning a new book is such a joy, and Plath gets my brain all twisty, which I like.
5. The Fiery One’s head smells of that great slightly musky man-smell, and that is just about one of the most comforting things there is.

Much like the over-sized glass stud thing that young men are sporting these day, I have a deep dislike for the fauxhawk. Just like the too-big earring thing, the fauxhawk makes a guy look like a little kid who got into his mother's hair gel and thinks that spiky means cool.

Learn about metoposcopy, which long ago went the way of phrenology.

Apparently, studies have found that the funneling of German children into certain types of education following the fourth grade reinforces social and economic disadvantages. No shit, Sherlock.

Labels: the dreams, the lists, the miscellany

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Doing Better, Waiting, And A Really Gross Dream

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

Why would anyone prescribe anti-depressants to children ages six and under, especially when the drug being prescribed has not even been approved? And, there are new anti-depressants that carry a suicide risk for teens (which ones don’t?), and doctors find this to be an acceptable risk?

If you want free books, head down to Mexico City's subway.

Eeksy-Peeksy is m-mmm good.

Okay, kids. Sorry about the big depressing lump that was yesterday's entry. I re-read it this morning and saw immediately how craptastic it was, so I've fashioned a new entry the very next day (today) to make up for it. I am going to be strict with myself and try to stick mainly to news and culture. I may diverge just a bit but not to worry, because I gave myself a good band-aid last night that should hold up for at least a day or two. After I wrote yesterday's entry, I felt a little stir-crazy. It is still fucking cold outside, and the Fiery One was away for the evening, and I had just finished writing out my misery, so I donned my coat and went out to a local pub for a pint and more writing. (Yes, on top of this blog I also keep a written journal). I wrote for a while, and then two acquaintances of mine asked me to join them at their table. It was great! I have always liked both of these individuals but have never gotten to know them very well, so it was refreshing and fun and so what I needed. Thank you, my two lovely acquaintances!

I salute you, Massachusetts, even if George W. doesn't.

Ohio ain't as friendly-like to the homos.

I know, I seem stuck on a topic lately, but really, leave gay people alone already! A 17-year sentence for giving a friend head is ridiculous.

What do you do if you're Larry Spencer? If he was smart enough, he would have to be terribly embarrassed of himself.

What do you do if you're Hendrik Schoen? I mean, really, he must also be terribly embarrassed of himself.

Really and truly now, I am becoming quite annoyed. For some reason, the building manager has seen fit to change not only the front door lock but every apartment door lock in the entire building, which means that I had to come home earlier than I wanted to so that I could let the Fiery One into the apartment (we haven’t had a chance to get extra keys made yet). The Fiery One told me to be home around 6 pm to let him in, and then I could go back to whatever I was doing. I did that. I came home. I am still at home. It is no longer 6 pm. It is now 7 pm. I hate waiting. I am not a good waiting person. I’m sure that there are a number of reasons for this lateness such as working overtime, the grocery store being a madhouse, the cab took forever to show up, he is succumbing to hypothermia by a roadside somewhere. Today, though, I really want to not be sitting here waiting, because there was somewhere else where I was having a conversation and enjoying myself, and the friend I was talking to who was likely going to still be there will no longer likely still be there, and I am still sitting here. Come home, Mr. Fiery One! Because on top of being anxious to run away from here, which is becoming less probable as the minutes