I'm Slightly Hung Over, And I'll Take Wine For $20,000

I have been trying to get this entry out for the last couple of days, so my apologies if it’s all old news to you folks out there. My difficulties with getting this one finished have been compounded this morning by a slight hangover (drinking snakebites at a goth dance party will do that to a girl), a really long long-distance phone call from my brother, and a terrible pot of watery coffee that I am embarrassed to say I made. Finally, though, this thing is getting done. The aspirin is kicking in, the phone call is over, and I’ve decided to accept the weak state of my joe. Here goes.

Sometimes, I am truly grateful that I do not live in Texas.

Join the fight against factory farming. Watch the “The Meatrix”.

You know your job sucks when:

The moral of this story is, don’t ever get caught taking bribes in China.

We all have ex-bosses that we think were some kind of evil, but at least they didn’t feed you to the lions.

I don’t know if the jail nurse was an idiot or not, but her job sure sounds like a paperwork nightmare.

Just a happy little link about the possibility of the destruction of the entire world.

If a blind, wild great horned owl from Wisconsin can get new eye lenses implanted so it can see, why do I have to be stuck behind such thick glasses? The world just isn’t right.

I bet you’re wondering where Bush was between late 1972 and early 1973, aren’t you?

The Fiery One and I went out for supper a couple of nights ago. It wasn’t supposed to be anything special. I was hungry, he was hungry, and there was some extra cash lying around, so we headed out to walk to a local haven of north american grease-founded cuisine. We were struck with how not painful the night air was for once. Instead of the biting and frostbite-inducing windchill, we were surrounded by still, blue air, the temperature of which created the sensation of freshness that is so often attributed to winter cold but I rarely get to experience in this frigid province. It struck me how little time we spend outside talking, or doing any communicating at all, during the winter months here. There the Fiery One and I were outside, chatting away and really enjoying the walk, when for the past few months a walk meant a brisk pace with your head down and your lips curled against each other to keep each other warm. It was like those scenes in movies where people are walking outside in winter and having long and involved conversations. It can happen. The weather, by the way, is not the point of this story.
(This paragraph also excludes the point of this story, but you should read it anyway). We were just about at the restaurant of our choice when we were faced with a decision we had not thought to make before. We found ourselves standing in the alley between two restaurants, the one we usually go to and one we have never gone to. We chose the latter, and went in. It was very old-school posh with red-velvet-lined booths and drapey curtains in the doorways and oil paintings of dead Canadian politicians on the walls with brass lamps to illuminate them. We got to sit under Trudeau and some ambassador guy in a corner booth. We were seated close together at the back of the booth by the waiter, and we suddenly knew that this was our seasonally romantic occasion thing. Good thing we decided that, because the food was freaking expensive, and we weren’t going to duplicate such decadence in the same week.
We were looking over the wine and spirits menu, and there was a special section halfway down one of the pages where there were three wines, each in their own red oval to set them aside from the other wines you could order (this is where I get to the point). The Fiery One pointed at the middle red oval and asked me what the commas meant in the prices. I had to think for a second, because the french use commas where we english speakers would use decimals when expressing the prices of things, and the number under this particular wine was ridiculous if I read it the english way. We asked the waiter about it. It was english. The place where we were having dinner has a bottle of wine you can buy for $20,000! I can live on that for a year, or buy a car, or actually go to France and live there for several months comfortably. After that, I didn’t even think about mentioning the cost listed on the menu for a measely five ribs. I couldn’t help thinking about what it would be like to be someone who can just drop $20,000 on a bottle of wine.

Here is what’s been up with Haiti for the last while. It’s not good.

Despite their government's best efforts, there will still be a Valentine's Day for some Iranians.

It is very, very nice to donate 1600 books to our poor children in the north, but it is ridiculous to do so when they have no building to put them in, and it is even more ridiculous to then offer them even more books and still no building.

At the place where I work, a lot of young people from Korea come through. I was never much of a t-shirt reader, because I think clothing that has words on it, especially brand logos, is tacky, but these Korean kids have the weirdest t-shirts, and so I have taken to specifically reading what theirs have to say. Here is a small sampling:

One t-shirt read Boyfriend Wanted: good hair, long sleeves, plays guitar.... Long sleeves are ever so important when it comes to boyfriends.

This t-shirt said Why not chew gum in class? with the word tomboy underneath. Oh, you rebel, you. You tomboy, with your gum-chewing.

A sweater with a zipper up the front that split up words that read Thursday on the first line and And on the second in appliqued letters. I watched this person closely to see if there was anything on the back. There wasn’t. There was just that, Thursday And.

I likes the idea of electric paper, I does. If they can make it so it reflects instead of emitting light and it is flexible, then I am all for the use of less paper of tree-origin.

Read this interview with Dr Mohammed al-Shiekh Mahmood Sayam, the man behind the intifada.

You all have probably heard about this one already, but so what. Here it is again – 30 human embryos cloned!

After all these years, Barbie and Ken are splitting up. (It's weird how adults talk about the lives of plastic dolls. Oh, shit, I'm doing it.)

I HEREBY COMMAND YOU TO READ GEORGE SAUNDERS. Yes? Good. “Jon” and “Sea Oak” serve as excellent introductions to Mr. Saunders and all his wit. If you are so inclined after reading these two short stories, which you will be, here is an interview and a fan site to get to know him by. You can wash all that down by running out and picking up a copy of Pastoralia.

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

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.

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

"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.