Nerd Nerd Nerd Fame Nerd Nerd

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Before I get into this post, may I just wave a big hello to the drug store post office guy I spoke to yesterday. Hello Post Office Guy! Take no offense at what you are about to read!

Yesterday was Wednesday, which meant that, if I mailed a card by the end of the day at the post office, my mother might just get her Mother's Day card on Friday, which meant that I might not get a replay of how all of her friends' children had sent them cards, called them, made them supper, taken them out to dinner, and had otherwise been attentive children, but, oh no, not that this reflects on you, dear.

If you did not notice, that was not a real sentence. Continue not to notice that. Thank you.

Not to say that I would not acknowledge my mother on Mother's Day, which Hallmark has made such a great day for spending and guilt by absentia, but I am not all that good with remembering these sorts of things. I am hard-pressed to remember the Palinode's birthday, Canada Day, or my paternal grandfather's death (which occurred on Halloween, and which I attended. How hard is that?), so I feel that I should be forgiven for being a little less than punctual due to my natural inability to remember numbers on an artificially imposed calendar system.

So, I amazed myself and, in the near future, my mother, by purchasing a Mother's Day card, writing a note inside it, and being at the post office to mail it in time. I felt proud and grown-up and on top of things, in general, until I walked up to the post office counter.

Hello, Post Office Guy (aka POG) said.

Hello, I said back.

I found your blog, POG said.

Gah.

I love having a weblog. I love writing for a weblog. Within the world of weblogs, I think I am doing pretty well. Key words: WITHIN THE WORLD OF WEBLOGS. I do not know why it sounds strange in regular, non-internet life, but when someone approaches me in public and voices the words your blog in front of other people, I suddenly feel like the biggest nerd who ever nerded. In fact, I feel like a nerd who has been singled out as a nerd out loud in a public nerding out that makes me feel nerdy. When they say I found your blog, they may as well say I found your YOU ARE A NERD.

So, POG said that he found my blog in front of a small line up consisting of the guy behind me, and the guy behind me smirked, and the floor wowed beneath my feet. Such is public nerd-dom. The floor will not actually swallow you. Instead, you will want it to swallow you, and then it will promise to swallow you when it dips beneath your feet, but then it won't, because you are a nerd, and if you can be a nerd at the post office, you can be a nerd anywhere. Fuck.

You're Smootsie, Smatzie, Schmootie? Smutsy? Schmootsee?

I raised an eyebrow.

Schmetzie? Schmutzie? POG finally hit on the pronunciation, which few people get right: shmuht'sē.

I nodded along while trying to look like this had nothing to do with me.

Guy behind me? Still smirking. Fucker. I could feel someone spelling out NERD with a laser pointer across the back of my head.

So, I paid for my stamp, and I tried to balance out the scale of Fame (I have been recognized in public) versus Nerd (I have been recognized in public because of my blog) in my head as I left the drug store. By the time I hit the anti-theft security gates at the door, I came up Nerd Nerd Nerd Fame Nerd Nerd.

Damn.

Still, there was that public recognition bit. Not bad. Despite the smirking you-are-such-a-blog-nerd smirking guy. I bet his claim to fame is no-one's-told-me-my-bald-patch-is-way-obvious, which neither fits neatly on a t-shirt nor is quick to type, so there's that.

So, POG? Don't feel bad. You put the Fame in Nerd Nerd Nerd Fame Nerd Nerd.

Labels: the here and now

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Things To Point Out

Sunday, May 4, 2008

It's already been up there for almost a week, but it hit me today that most of you never visit my actual site and instead prefer to read the text removed from its context within the fabulous template, which is of my own creation, so I thought I would write a terrificly long sentence to tell you that you should come to my actual website and take a look at this month's masthead. It is raining, but my birdies? They are so happy.

Also, I have this new link right up there under the masthead that leads to the Suggestion Box. You might find me self-flagellating and tearing my hair out (what is long enough to grab a hold of) later when some twits decide it will be all funny to suggest I eat more cock or do something more important with my life like save the Arctic's Layson Albatross from their own stupid habit of getting killed by things while sleeping in mid-flight.

The purpose of the Suggestion Box, though, is to find out what you want to know about or what you want to know more about, and the vast majority of you people are truly very nice and know how to use a person's suggestion box appropriately and with respect, especially when said person's suggestion box is all new and virgin-like and in need of decent treatment so that it does not grow into a bitter shell that balks at the very thought of anyone even daring to hit its submit button. Right now, it is a wide-eyed little fledgling of a thing, batting its eyelashes at passers-by and hoping for lollipops.

Thirdly, I received my bi-monthly e-mail from Photojojo which has the Photo Time Capsule of my photos from approximately one year ago. It made me immediately pissy about the 14°C (61°F) weather that I was enjoying until that moment:

That picture was taken out on a deck at night about a year ago. Last year at this time it was warm enough to do that, but this year, it is still going down to about 5°C (41°F) at night, if not colder, and I doubt anyone is going to be sharing icy drinks outside tonight unless they're homeless.

The weather and I are going to have to have a serious sit-down about this, especially since I already have to close my living room window at 6:22 p.m. because it is getting too cold to have it open, even though the sun is still out. It's fucking May! And I want my deck drinks!

Labels: the here and now, the metablogging

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I Am So Smrt

Friday, May 2, 2008

When I ordered a deli sandwich for lunch, I asked for all the stuff I don't like on my sandwiches except for mustard, which I do like. I even thought wow, this sandwich sucks while the person was making it, but it never occurred to me that I should in any way change my order. Disassociate much?

Now I am picking chunks of low-grade corned beef out of my teeth and wondering why I didn't go for the soup.

I have readjusted all the settings at my desk at work so that positions of both my chair and keyboard stand are different. I spent most of the morning with my knees pressed firmly against part of the keyboard stand's undercarriage, and as a result, the knees of my trousers are shiny. Now it looks like, well, uhm, let's just say it look like I spend a lot of time on my knees.

I don't feel like talking about fellatio today.

If you use the end of your retractable pen to scratch the itch between your boobs, make sure that it is indeed retracted, especially if you are wearing a low-cut sweater.

When I wrote "you" in the above sentence, I meant "me". I highlighted my cleavage very effectively with several bold strokes of a blue ballpoint pen at about 10:00 a.m.

I am wearing two mismatched black socks today, and it's driving me mental. The one on my left foot only goes about three inches above my ankle, while the one on my right goes nearly to my knee. They are slightly different shades of black. One has pills on the heel, and the other does not. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. It's kind of freaking me out.

One foot feeling slightly different than the other foot = onset of the Apocalypse.

I may be so moved to take our entire sock drawer after work, throw it in a bag for good will, and start fresh with the purchase of twenty pairs of identical socks.

I am terrible at remembering names, so it is unfortunate that my brain spits out the name Warren for every proper noun it tries to recall these days.

What's that guy's name again? The one who's in construction? Warren.
What's that declaration that's so import in the United States? Warren.
Where is it that what's-his-head lives? Warren.

And if it's just a regular noun I am trying to recall, my brain throws out donut, like that ever applies. I don't even eat donuts. In fact, I don't even spell it that way. I spell it doughnut. Oh, hello wrong noun! You have annoying spelling!

This is not useful to me.

Last night, I dreamt about a band of lesbian serial killers who abducted me, stripped me naked, and carried me around in a hockey equipment bag. That's just stupid. It was all the more stupid for the fact that every time I tried to escape, people just returned me to the lesbian serial killers. Even the other people in my dream wouldn't buy my band-of-lesbian-serial-killers story, even though I was running around town wearing nothing but a shower curtain.

I was on the telephone with the Palinode when I accidentally knocked over one of those little desk organizers that holds paperclips and elastic bands.

Oh, crap!

What'd you do? he asked.

I just, uh, knocked something over, I answered.

What did you knock over?

I don't want to tell you, because it's kind of embarrassing, but okay. It was my collection of favourite paperclips.

Your collection of favourite paperclips! Oh, noes! he cried mockingly.

Yes, I have collection of favourite paperclips, and they have their own little tray, and they are lovely, and they make me feel serene in my heart, so you can suck it.

Labels: the here and now, the lists

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My Sweet Widdle Gopher

Monday, April 21, 2008

(This photo was found here.)

During my breaks at work, I often slip outside by myself. Near a particular nook where I stand to take shelter from the wind, there is a gopher hole. The gopher who pokes his head out of it is never too thrilled with my presence, and he whistles at me in this way that puffs out his cheeks to tell me to get off his fecking property already while only blinking one eye at a time. I click my tongue at him in return, which always makes him cock his head a bit, as though he could decipher what I might be trying to say. I like him.

I am also fully aware that this little gopher is probably fifty different gophers that have burrowed under that section of land, but I am an inveterate anthropomorphizer. I prefer to think of all fifty gophers that might pop their heads up out of that hole as this one, whom I have decided is male. This way, I feel less like of an idiot when I ask him how his day is going, and I can pretend that we are getting used to each other. The first time I met him, he stuck only his nose above the grassline, but now he emerges to show his entire head and shoulders. I imagine that he is starting to like me, too.

Apparently, gophers are creatures of habit, just like us. The grass is still a bit long from last fall, so it has been beaten down into three clear trails from the gopher's hole. To me, the hole looks round, and it would make as much sense in that open section of lawn to run in one direction as any other, but there are the three trails anyway. I followed one to see if there was a hole at its other end, but it eventually tapered off until there was no obvious path left.

This gopher and his trails through the grass have been sitting in my brain for days. That nook out of the wind and those paths have entered several dreams over the last three nights. When I pass patches of grass elsewhere, I look to see if there are any similar trails there. I click my tongue at other gophers as though I know them. You would think with all the whistling this little guy does to tell me to get lost that I would not be so weirdly obsessed with him and his ilk.

I am calling this a phase and leaving it at that, because this is strange. I completely get that. Besides, there is no support group in which I could stand up and say "There's this gopher who just won't like me". There is no book called He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Gophers. I know that this gopher will never crawl into my lap to groom his tail.

You would like him, too, though. I swear. There is this really cute part just at the end of his whistling when he deflates his cheeks in one big puff, and sometimes, if it is still enough, you can hear the little whoosh of air. And that cock of his head when he listens to your tongue click? Priceless.

So. Yeah. Ahem.

I feel like I can't end it here. I have to explain something to you. I am not in love with this fifty-in-one gopher. That would be ridiculous. I just want to get all schmoopy on him like that abominable snowman who loves Daffy Duck.



I just want to pet him and kiss him and maybe put his little feet in my mouth. You know, the usual.

Now I am all defensive, and I want to make sure that you understand that this unreasonable sweetness I feel is purely nonsexual in nature. It is like I want to make babies, only I want them to be furry, little, burrowing rodents.

Yes, that makes it ALL better, doesn't it? Sheesh. Just click this link and forget that we ever had this conversation.

Thank you.

Labels: the here and now, the videos

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Saturday Night Date

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Last night, the Palinode and I went on traditional-type date, which we do not normally do, because we do most things together anyway. Let's hear it in unison now: Awwwwwww.

We saw Guillermo Del Toro's "The Orphanage", which had me gripping the Palinode's arm and swallowing around a dry tongue, because I am becoming a bigger and bigger wuss with every passing year. I used to be able watch all kinds of suspense and gore, but once I turned thirty, I become a shivering leaf at the mere intimation of the ghost of a dead kid.

Oh noes! There's a kid with a sack over his head! Beware the sack-headed, for they will behave unpredictably and likely have bloodlust!

Afterward, we had drinks at a nearby pub, where I became a people magnet. I had spent Saturday afternoon in lesser breakdown mode, which involved crying into a roll of toilet paper while quietly listing all proofs of life's futility, so I thought people would have stayed far afield of me, but no, they eagerly told me about their families, the plight of lesbian-owned bookstores and sex toy shops, their bunny costumes, and their views on multiple orgasms and whether a partner's skill is imperative to have them.

Later in the evening, a woman I had just met pointed at me and yelled You are a magnet, lady. A MAGNET!

Mmmm, beer. And lo, it was good, until it was no longer good. Saturday nights at a pub are for twenty-something females participating in the cult of femininity to parade around in ridiculous shoes in an effort to sexually entice twenty-something males who are fetishists of the feminine who try to appear disinterested while wearing ridiculous pants. Last night, I was the thirty-something in old jeans pulled from the laundry basket who was talking to a new acquaintance about the inhibiting role of attachment to creative work and who had had enough of getting eyefuls of underwear hanging out of the tops of pants on assless boys.

And then it was Sunday, which is today, and I slept. Isn't that what old ladies with cats and who are recovering from lesser breakdowns do on Sundays?

Labels: the here and now, the photographs

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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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Creation From The Sickbed

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Today was a sick day. I spent the entire day reclining in bed in order to avoid the painful task of holding up my own head.

A day like this drives me nuts. When I cannot stay awake long enough to write a cohesive thought, let alone keep both eyes focused and staring in the same direction for more than five or ten minutes, I become irrationally depressed. I am a compulsive creator. At any given point when I am not at my full-time job, I am likely involved in the act of creation. I am writing a poem/weblog entry/whatnot, knitting a scarf/armwarmers (my knitting repertoire is presently limited), taking photographs, building a desk, designing a website, etcetera. If I am not giving at least partial attention to a creative project, I feel useless.

In brief, I continually seek out creative opportunity in order to stave off feelings of failure and to use every second my short life has to offer before the finality of death.

No! It's my sunny and hopeful disposition!

No, I'm kidding. It is my overwhelming anxiety about my own mortality.

Things were becoming dire when I told the cats that I was going to change my whole life and run away and become a beat-boxing carny, and I was going to quit my job and knit appliance cozies for a living, and I was going to lose my motherf-ing mind if I did not create the beginnings of a zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I found that if I took a short nap, I could sit upright for a good fifteen minutes before the pain began to draw down from my face into my shoulder blades, so I put my little Olympus Stylus 790 SW camera beside my bed, slept for a while, and when I woke up, voilà! The afternoon sun was bright, which was perfect for picture-taking from a sickbed.

The photograph above is of the tangerine-coloured duvet cover we bought off a sale table. I had been eying it for two weeks, thinking that it would definitely be gone before I could buy it, but nope. Strangely, most people do not have tangerine-friendly bedroom colour schemes. Or rather, other people often have colour schemes they adhere to, and I tend to just buy things that grab my attention, which explains the deep fuchsia cover I have on our aqua couch.

Oskar tried to act like HIS windowsill was HIS and HIS alone, but he is literally only half the size of his fellow apartment cat, who thinks that everything Oskar does is solid gold.

The cats, Oskar in black and Onion in frankenkitty, spent two hours glued to the windowsill after major fur-ripping, hissing, and furniture rearrangement prolonged negotiations. It was the first time since last year that the weather was gentle and warm enough to have the window propped wide open, and you would have thought that they had never heard car horns, seen people walking down the sidewalk, and watched birds jump through the trees.

Onion has this thing he does where he spasms his lower jaw up and down while he twitches his whiskers and makes this sound that goes something like ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. I know that it means he would rend the head from that little robin hopping on the lawn, but it makes me happy nonetheless.

And then, because I thought I could handle standing up to take a few close-up shots, I went back to bed and promptly fell over. For reals, I fell over, or at least I assume that I fell over, because shortly after I took these pictures, I lost consciousness and woke up drooling with my face mashed into the Palinode's side of the bed. Luckily, none of my drool got onto our new tangerine duvet cover, because it was kind of crusty in the way that only a dehydrated, semi-invalid's drool could be.

Labels: the here and now, the photographs

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Notes On Today

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Our african violet still flourishes beneath its coat of cat hair and brown sugar.

I watched from the balcony as people left their houses and apartments with food, easter baskets, and bottles of alcohol under their arms. They were each of them alone, going somewhere else.

Just when I thought there was nothing left with which to wipe our bottoms, I found a roll of paper towel under the sink, and it has proved soft enough. This seems like a silly worry, especially in light of the fact that many people today are remembering a man who was skewered by nails and mounted on wood.

When I went out to the balcony a second time to sip my fresh coffee and watch the monstrous crow across the street sway on high, spindly branches, there were young parents in the street counselling their children with demands of Don't run! and Be good! and Get out of that puddle! I thought about how the children I will not have might have worn yellow rubber boots.

I remembered how my old cat, Pepper, used to stay out at all hours when the weather finally warmed up, and my mother would stand out on the front step in the dark calling Here, pussy, pussy, pussy! I could hear it echoing around the neighbourhood. That embarrassed me to no end.

I had a ninety-minute nap in which I dreamt that time was like a noodley rubber tube. I had the good fortune of being allowed a peek down this tube, and, man, reality is a pretty fucking cool place.

I made big messes all over the apartment, because when I spring clean, I make things much worse before they get better:


Mid-Spring-Clean Mess from schmutzie on Vimeo.

Luckily, the crazy mess pictured above has since been partially remedied. That bed? It's not even in the room anymore. I am way strong.

And now? I am drinking red wine out of a brushed metal wine glass and waiting for warm sheets to come out of the dryer while watching a disturbing episode of "Medium", which I am starting to think is a harder-core version of the pornification of woman-hate that "Law & Order" does so well.

Labels: the here and now, the videos Schmutzie made

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My Lunch And Why It Was Less Than Good

Friday, March 7, 2008

I am presently eating a vegetable stirfry with extra vegetables. The guy at the counter said What would you like?, and I said I would like broccoli, carrots, bell peppers, baby corn, onions, and more broccoli, and then he went ahead and gave me broccoli, carrots, carrots, baby corn, carrots, one piece of celery, carrots, 3 strips of bell pepper, carrots, and no onions, because he was talking to this man who was a professor of Philosophy who could not decide if the szechuan sauce was quite right or if he wanted his stirfry with the orange ginger sauce.

Professor Of Philosophy actually had patches on the elbows of his corduroy jacket.

And then the man on the other side of me started yelling in Chinese with a woman behind the counter. I have nothing against Chinese, but I do have a lot against having a stranger yell in my ear, and they did that until it was too late to tell Stirfry Cook that I was going to turn orange from a beta-carotene overdose if he did not pay more attention to me.

I have been sitting here eating nothing but carrots out of this thing, because I want to even out the vegetable ratio before I start consuming the other stuff and the yummy egg noodles. The carrots are bitter, and they hurt the roof of my mouth where it swelled up from sleeping with my mouth open all night. I must fall asleep with my mouth open when I fall asleep right after sex, because I am the sort who goes OH. MY. GAWD. THATWasgood. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, and it never fails that sex in the evening is followed by Swollen Mouth Roof Syndrome in the morning.

So, now that I have eaten approximately a hundred carrot slices, I am almost too full to start on the bulk of the stirfry, which is finally looking palatable. If any of my organs fail from a Vitamin A overdose, I am gunning for Professor Of Philosophy. I know Stirfry Cook is really at fault for not paying attention, but he at least smiled at me. Professor Of Philosophy just stood there in his stupid elbow patches taste-testing sauces from tiny spoons with his pinky finger in the air.

The End.

I am a participant in Blog 365.

Labels: the here and now

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Goodbye Purse, Hello Award

Friday, February 29, 2008

I heard the telephone ringing just as I was getting into the shower this morning, to which I thought Fuh. Kew., because the telephone is almost never a bearer of good news. The telephone brings people from India who try to convince me that I have won an all-expenses paid trip to Cuba if only I will let them steal my credit card number and French-Canadian girls who ask in broken english Please to imagine that you have our shopping card, and then there are those annoying calls made through Skype that garble the sound and cut me off just as I am beginning to understand who it is exactly that is calling me from Thailand, or was that Toronto? Plus, it was 6:30 a.m., and no one ever calls that early just to let you know that they are thinking of you.

After my shower, the telephone started ringing again, which made me feel obligated to find out what the horrible thing was that I obviously needed to know while I was dripping wet.

The horrible thing that I obviously needed to know while I was dripping wet was that my purse that I left in a taxi three weeks ago - the one with my wallet, all of my ID, and my recent offline writing - cannot be returned to me by the cab driver who had it, because the other guy who also drives his cab claims that it "went missing".

Good Cabbie, the one who put my purse in the trunk of the taxi three weeks ago, also told Bad Cabbie, the regular driver, to return it to me three weeks ago. The dispatcher told me that Bad Cabbie claimed to have dropped it off with me already one week ago. When I called the cab company to tell them that no purse had been returned to me, Good Cabbie told me that Bad Cabbie said it was stolen out of the trunk by a ride he gave to people with luggage. Bad Cabbie can bite my sweet patootie, because I think he-of-two-conflicting-liesstories kept my purse.

I cannot prove a damn thing, of course, so goodbye personal information and writing! I hope you have fun being used by someone who wants to assume my identity! Crap.

The whole purse theft revelation so early in the morning before I had even had a cup of coffee to sober me from sleep left me in a dark mood, so I cast about for some happiness, and guess what? I found it! It was hiding in a little document file with the title "Excellent".

Both Jennifer from Open Book and Heidi from Ramblings thought to bestow the Excellent Blog Award upon me, which originated from Project Mommy. I may not have my practical black purse with all of my ID in it, but I keep a weblog that has been deemed E for Excellent by two of my colleagues. That's got to count for something.

I would like to pass this award on to a few weblogs that have stood out for me lately as places that I like to visit when I am trying to avoid the quajillion loads of laundry that I have to do:

Jen Lemen - She is thoughtful and warm and pretty and takes delicious photographs that make everyday sights look enchanted. She also makes good things that you should buy.

Counting Sheep - This woman is funny. Her dog is funny. She talks about bodily functions a lot, which always wins me over for some reason. If you like poop, it's the place to be.

Momster - Her weblog is simple, and her posts are usually headed by her latest Polariod photograph and followed by a short description or post. It's the simplicity that grabs me. It feels clean and easy, unlike our thirty, dirty, unmatched socks.

Swapatorium - Its tagline is "a journey through junkland", and that is what it is. I love it. I cannot get enough of old letters, photographs, and memorabilia, and Swapatorium helps feed my addiction without also helping me to hoard boxes of other people's papers behind my furniture like I used to do.

Stuff White People Like - Is this racist? Yes? Well, I am caucasian, so I get to laugh at it.

Thank you, Jennifer and Heidi!

I am a participant in Blog 365.

Labels: the here and now, the recognition

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Me And The Palinode And A Homeless Guy Make Three

Thursday, February 28, 2008

On Sunday morning, I did something unusual. I woke up early. And then I did something else that was unusual, simply because I rarely do it when I am at home. I decided to head out to the balcony for a cigarette. After two unusual things happening so close together, I could have guessed that a third unusual thing was about to take place, if only because I have a superstitious belief in like events happening in threes.

I put on my coat and scarf and stepped out into the apartment building hallway. My brain went Ack!, and I paused for a moment. There was a largish man sleeping on the floor with his shoes and socks off warming his feet by the radiator. He jerked awake when I closed the apartment door.

It got cold out last night, huh? I asked. I did not know what else to say. My heart was whirring and skipping beats.

Uh, yeah. I froze my feet, he said.

I can see that. Good thing that's a warm radiator! I said, and I hurried to the end of the hall and stepped out onto the balcony.

I felt like an idiot standing out there. What kind of asshole was I to comment that he was lucky to have a warm radiator in a public hallway in a building he did not even live in? I waited for my fear reaction to calm down, threw away the last half of my cigarette, and went back inside, hoping to catch him before he got all his stuff together and left. I caught him just as he was tying his shoelaces.

Coffee? I asked.

What?

I mean, would you like some coffee? It'll make you feel better after sleeping on the floor, I said.

Sure, he said. He raised his eyebrows a bit. I think that I shocked him with my offer. I know that I shocked myself with my offer.

Yes! Let's just invite large, homeless men in for morning coffee! I do not mean to disparage homeless men, in particular, because I have got nothing personally against either the homeless or men. It is just that large, powerful looking individuals who may or may not be desperate/on drugs/drunk that are passed out two feet from my apartment door usually strike a bit of fear in me. I also could not figure out what I was doing. I was barely awake. I was either being terribly good-natured or I was exhibiting a suicidal tendency. I decided to roll with it and see what happened.

Moving on from the apologetics and back to the story: he obliged me, and I woke up the Palinode and told him to put some pants on. (This is the best way to wake up your partner on a Sunday morning).

Huh? What's going on? he asked, barely able to open his eyes.

There's a homeless man in the hallway that I invited in for coffee. He seems nice, I said.

What? A homeless guy?

Yeah. He's got good energy, you know? I think it's okay.

I still don't know what's going on, but okay, he said, resigned to whatever I was going to subject him to. God bless him.

The homeless guy came into our apartment, and he was the most socially careful and polite person I think we have ever had over, and that includes my mother, whose manners are always impeccable. He would not even move from the front entry to take a seat in the living room until I very nearly physically prodded him to do so.

Over the next hour-and-a-half, the homeless guy, the Palinode, and I sat and talked through two pots of coffee. We talked about relationships (his girlfriend had kicked him out), poetry (he would like to be a poet), cars (his had gone kaput), ballroom dancing (he loves it, even if he does not fit in), houses (he had to sell his), building (he is a construction worker when he is employed), pets (his dog was hit and killed by a car), and health (he is into natural food and green tea and naturopathy).

I would not suggest that you all run out and invite the first person off the street (or sleeping outside your front door) in for coffee this weekend, but I have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable, relaxing Sunday mornings that I have recently had. Even our cats liked him. Or at least they found his smell fascinating (Oskar spent an hour taking careful inventory of each section of his clothing, looking up only occasionally with his mouth hanging open to squint his eyes, which is a sure sign of smellrificity (that is the state of being smellrific, don't you know.)).

There was none of the ax-murdering, hostage-taking, or any other such violent behaviour of the kind you might fear when inviting in unknown large people of possibly unfavourable origin into your home. It was all polite coffee and getting to know each other.

He even invited us to check out his ballroom dancing class, which makes me all the more happy that he found our hallway radiator to save his toes. I am sure that the East Coast Swing or the Quickstep would be more than difficult without those ten little digits.

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The Laundry Room Run-In

Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Palinode and I live in an apartment building with shared laundry facilities. I would love to have a washer and dryer in our apartment, but this building was built about eighty or so years ago and is not equipped for such modern technologies. That is probably also why our building's laundry facilities are so freaking spanktastic:

There are only two washers and two dryers stuck in a nook in a corner of one of the scariest basements I have ever lived above.

Of course, nothing beats the basement below the first place I lived when I moved out on my own. My roommate and I were checking to see if there was any storage area down there and were met with what looked like a forgotten crime scene. An old mattress that was shoved up against a wall was covered in what looked like dried blood and clumps of what may have been human hair were stuck to the crumbling concrete floor. Next to that, the hills of rodent droppings and the old rope in the rafters seemed like nothing.

I was down in our mildly horrifying laundry room this afternoon, and both the washing machines were stopped and the dryers were empty, so I checked inside one of the washers. All it had in it was one blanket, so I took it out and placed it inside a dryer. If it was somebody's underwear, I would normally just leave it untouched, but I figured that no one would lose their shit over my touching their wet blanket and putting it where it was going to go anyway.

That sounds like I should insert some sexual innuendo right now, but I am not.

I put some detergent in the now empty washer and was starting to put our bedding into it when this big, early-twenties dude showed up.

I was going to use that washer! he said.

You weren't here, I said. It came out sounding kind of smarmy, but I was a little taken aback. It is a shared public laundry room.

I left stuff in there so no one else could use it, he said. His voice was shaking with anger.

Uhm, no, you cannot do that, buddy. He had commandeered the laundry room for the entire afternoon, and I was not about to sleep in a bed that my cat had so thoughtfully dragged kitty litter onto, not to mention the toenail clippings I found embedded in the chenille bedspread.

Well, you weren't here. And I'm just using one of the washers. You still have the other one.

Apparently, he really needed to wash all of the clothing he owned all at once today. It is really very cold here right now, so maybe he honestly did need six pairs of pants, three sweaters, eight t-shirts, and twelve mismatched socks to get through the night.

He continued to stand there, visibly vibrating with rage, and restated over and over how he thought both public washing machines were his even though he had not been there to continue using them. It was weird. I could feel his ugly energy washing all over me, and I started to feel a very real fear. I had left him the full use of one of the two washers and both of the dryers, so his overreaction was worrisome. I wondered how well my screams would carry from down there in the dank.

Look, here, you can use this washer. I've already put detergent in it, but it's good stuff. He had completely rattled me, because I found myself taking out the sheets I had already put into the washer. My hands and arms were getting sticky with liquid detergent.

I don't want to use your detergent.

No, it's okay. Go ahead.

No, I don't want to use your detergent. He tried to lock his eyes menacingly with mine. I busied myself with stuffing the rest of my bedding into the washer.

Oh, I see. My ownership of any detergent immediately putrefies it. Sweet jeebus. At least my horrible failing as a human being paid off in my being able to use the washer that I had already loaded with my bedding when he was not there with any laundry to reload it.

I have enlisted the Palinode to put the laundry in the dryer later. I think I have had enough of that hulking, angry laundry freak for today. I am willing to admit that maybe touching his wet blanket was a slight overstep, but getting all vibraty and shaky-voiced over not being able to have continual run of the whole public laundry area makes it seem like someone needs to get himself to anger management therapy, pronto.

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If you are so moved, please vote for me in each of the following three categories in the Canadian Blog Awards:
Best Personal Blog, Best Photo/Art Blog, and Best Humour Blog. Thank you.

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Pushing Punch Cards Into Slots

Thursday, January 10, 2008

People often confuse boredom with depression.

We are overstimulated to excess; by that, I do not mean merely that we are too stimulated, but that we are too overstimulated. There are televisions and computers and radios in the morning, often accompanied by traffic and children and alarm clocks, microwaves that beep, drive-thru coffee shops and gas stations. We meet an onslaught of people and things in the world that demand our attention often before the sun has even risen.

This bores us. Our minds need to wander a little. They need to remember our pasts, imagine things, look ahead, concentrate on problems, but they are squeezed down the narrow funnel of schedules and maintenance. There is so much to do simply to maintain the pattern of our lives that most of our energy becomes devoted to that pattern. We are bored, because we spend so much of our time performing the equivalent of pushing punch cards into slots.

I am often guilty of mistaking the structure for my life. I can trip along in this blindness for days, weeks, and months until I stub my toe on something that moves me, like Utah Phillips telling stories or the right string of poetic phrases, and then it is as though I remember myself. The structure - meetings, my morning muffin, the city bus trips, grocery shopping, feeding the cats - becomes just that: a construct. Then, I feel flailing and hurt, because if I am not these things, what am I? I am a vulnerable thing. I am a small thing. I am a turtle without a shell.

In those soft moments between the hard particulars, I want to run like hell, light out of whatever place I am in as though my hair is on fire. I imagine that I will be a land-loving hippie with sticks in my hair. Or I will be an outsider artist on a llama farm. Or I will become an ascetic poet who still drinks whiskey. I will take up guitar. I will make art films. I will publish books. I will take thousands of photographs. I will build furniture. I will collect clockwork toys and open a museum.

But then it is time to catch the bus again, and I head home to make supper, watch television, bring the clothes up from the dryer, and ready the alarm clock for another day.

(Also posted at RealMental.org.)

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Mascara And Tweezers, But Mostly Mascara

Friday, January 4, 2008

Queen Latifah really sold me on this new mascara.* It was shocking to me that I found myself so drawn in. It separates? It volumizes? Its brush is a new technological wonder, you say? Why, Ms. Latifah, I do believe that my thin, mousy lashes need some of the black, velvety goodness of which you speak.

And that is partially why I found myself in Shoppers Drug Mart last night after work. The other reason was that I needed a new pair of tweezers, because one of my infernal cats stole my favourite pair of twenty years and dropped them down a wormhole. This is highly aggravating, because I am a daily plucker who likes a precise implement, and most tweezers are far inferior to the pair I stole from my mother in 1988.

There are round-, square-, and chisel-tipped varieties with or without some kind of rubber or grooved metal grips. Some are blunted and some are pointier and more precise. They can be long or short. None of them aside from my original pair seem to have the precision or grip that I had until recently with my cat-disappeared pair.

The new pair I picked up are chisel-tipped, blunted, and short, and although I got better at using them with practice last night, they simply do not measure up. Now one of my eyebrows doesn't match the other and I accidentally ripped some skin off my chin.

But I was not only there for tweezers. The Queen Latifah mascara was high on my list. My previous brand had a tendency to smudge and flake off into my eyeballs, so her sulty promises of long-wearability and lack of flakiness had me searching for that magic, orange tube. The Cosmetics Counter Lady approached me when it became obvious that I had lost all focus in the sea of moulded plastic packaging and wildly overpowering perfume samples.

I'm looking for the Queen Latifah mascara, I said.

That just came in today, and there's only one left already. It's waterproof.

Excellent, I said. I have really long lashes that bat against the inside of my eyeglasses, and the only way that I have found to avoid having to peer through constant smudge marks is to wear waterproof mascara.

It's not that great, though, she said. It's not wet and clumpy like I like it.

Wet and clumpy? I looked at her eyes and noticed that she had approximately seven broad-based, black spikes running along each lid. These were her lashes. Wet and clumpy, indeed. She reminded me of something out of "Rocky Horror Picture Show".

Well, uh, I'm more of a separated and quick-drying sort, I said.

If that's what you're looking for, she said with a note of disbelief in her voice. This kind will work, but I have to warn you that you won't get the build-up you want.

That's okay with me.

And it separates each of your lashes. You're not going to get any clumping. She could not fathom a desire for non-clumpy lashes.

That's fine, I confirmed.

Okay, but you also won't be able to drag it along your lower lashes the same way, so they won't look as heavy.

I was really starting to wonder who had put this person in charge of the cosmetics department. I do not think that she had ever heard of using makeup for simple enhancement of features rather than for complete reconstruction. She had various shades of bruise-coloured eyeshadow coursing upward to her brows from a thick line of liquid liner behind her eyelash spikes. It was hard to tell with all the competing blacks between her face and her hair, but I think she had dyed her eyebrows black, as well.

That's okay, too. I don't really wear that much on my lower lashes anyway.

She regarded me skeptically, paused, and said, Well, okay. I hope you like it.

She had very little faith in my choice of product.

I have never encountered this degree of incredulity when trying to find mascara that defines the lashes and does not clump. In fact, I have never encountered any incredulity when it comes to the purchase of what is normally considered better quality mascara.

Am I missing something? Is my thinking all wrong about this mascara issue? Because if wet and clumpy is what I am supposed to be looking for, then I do not know how I will keep the lenses of my glasses from becoming streaky with my natural eyelash oil. Perhaps the Cosmetics Counter Lady could tell me what brand of varnish she uses to secure the extra clumps of mascara to her lashes.

I have spent all day ignoring my urge to go up to people and say Omigod, lookatthis. I am wearing THEE worst mascara EVAR. My lashes are all separated and thick and shit. Where the fuck are the clumps? Where?!

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* I have not been solicited to sell this mascara. I just mention it because I think it is hilarious that I was suddenly on fire to own the same mascara that Queen Latifah was hawking. Also, I like it so far.

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The Holiday Season Left Its Mark

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

I have no photographs to show you.

I thought that I should have at least some, because photography is one of my Things, and it was the holiday season, but, nope, there are no new ones sitting inside my camera's memory card. I did not take a camera out to a single Christmas or New Years event.

I did, however, buy a $30 tripod that extends to 57 inches tall and spend over $100 on Polaroid film that may or may not work for my Holga Polaroid back that the Palinode gave me a year ago. Later today, I plan on setting up my camera and tripod, rigging up a bristle board backdrop, and using dental floss and maybe some blue wax as props. Depending on the outcome, you may or may not see the results before spring.

I se