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.

Doing Better, Waiting, And A Really Gross Dream

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 tick by, I missed the Fiery One today and want to see his sunny face. Please don’t be freezing to death on somebody’s lawn, my dear. That would be terrible. And you would be too cold to cuddle properly.

Von Hagens does gruesome work with the corpses, he does. (I can’t help it. I love the gruesome).

Since when does being a strong female mean making fun of and bullying boys? Such overtly negative messages would almost never be considered in mainstream culture if the target was females.

Last night I had the strangest dreams. Most of my dreams lately have been either too easily forgotten or painfully boring, but the dreams of last night held on to me so tightly that I woke several times in an effort to rid myself of them. The last one went on and on, and its beginnings have kind of trailed away on me, but the atrocious end is still with me. In the dream, I had just left a situation in which I felt forced to consume mass quantities of disgusting meat by-products, the worst of which was called “cow knuckles”. These could be sucked at to remove most of the meat, but the boney/cartilaginous knuckle had to be swallowed whole. I managed to extricate myself from the large group of us that sat gorging ourselves at a long table and went to a public shower area in order to try to clean some of the meat-stench from my person. Shortly after entering the shower, several people came in as well, and there we were, all of us naked. I turned to the side to discreetly vomit up a cow’s knuckle that was being pesky in my esophagus, and then turned back to the crowd. While the shower head coursed water down on us, I held up a particularly grisly grill and a scrub brush. The grill was heavily caked with animal fat and old meat, and the smell grew more and more powerful with the heat of the water. I proceeded to instruct the eight or so people in the shower with me on the finer points of removing caked-on animal fat from grills. I was unable to pull my eyes from the sight of heavy chunks falling and sitting thickly in the water on the shower stall floor.

And to finish things off on a happier and less disgusting note, here is the Online Etymology Dictionary. It is my newest joy.

The Tenants, January Blues, And Boobs

“Suicide in the Box” is an incredibly depressing look at the effects of solitary confinement on the mentally ill.

Due to my moth-to-the-flame-ishness when it comes to the grisly, the Pickton serial murder case fascinates me. The story is becoming more and more terrible as they uncover DNA from women who were not on their original list of the missing.

I recently finished reading Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants. I feel like I have had several hours of my life stolen from me. It was one of those books where you can see from the outset that you are going to have difficulties with the style, or the characters, or the storyline, but you feel that once you have gotten through the first fifty pages, come hell or high water, you must finish it. Thanks to the powers that be that it was only 212 pages long. The two main characters in the story are a Jewish man Harry Lesser and an African-American man named Willie Spearmint. They are both writers squatting in an old building and trying to finish their manuscripts. Malamud took great pains to make every point he had to make about the difficulty of race relations in the United States painfully obvious. The storyline references it without being too plain, then Lesser has a couple of pages to think about it, and then Lesser and Willie have a confrontation to really drive the point home. If after all that you have still missed it, the whole thing is re-enacted over and over in a rising crescendo of violence until the last page, which is nothing but line upon line of the word “mercy” repeated. Oh, but wait, it’s not just about repetition; it’s also about being racist. I called out regularly to the Fiery One in intellectual pain when Malamud would refer to Willie as “the black” for the thousandth time, or when Malamud would describe Willie as having attacked Lesser “savagely” and as having eyes that “popped” from his head. Ouch. So, in closing, I finished it, it was terrible despite the claim on the cover that it is “a remarkable work of art”, and you should avoid it. Save what time you have to live for better things.

Marriages performed civilly outside the church are a legal matter, not religious, so what is the big deal if homosexuals want to enter into the same kind of legally binding union that is afforded heteros? Congrats, Quebec, on joining in with Ontario and British Columbia to fight for our secular rights!

And while I am on the subject of accepting homosexuality culturally, here are the Canadian and world same-sex rights timelines.

That’s it, Mr. Bush. Antagonize a country that we know has nuclear weapons.

This winter weather is really starting to get to me. I lean heavily toward the Seasonal-Affective-Disorder type of depression, and -40 degrees Celsius, which keeps me caged in this little apartment, does not help the situation. With nothing much else to do but finish the evilness known as The Tenants and nurse frostbite, I started thinking about the hollow spot left by depression and the ways in which we all try to fill it up. I don’t always recognize the depression, but I recognize the urge to fill up the hole. I fill this hole with books, beer, a new hair colour, cigarettes, trips to my hometown, movies, blogging, planning new projects that will remain unfinished, eating too much, avoiding food, television, buying new sweaters. Nothing fills the fucking hole. The only thing that can fill the hole is what makes the hole, and that is the changing of the season. It will happen. I know it, you know, we all know it, but the ass end of January makes it feel like this is the only way things are ever going to be.
I just read over that last paragraph. That sounds ghastly. I would like to assure you all that I am less an unending-deep-pit-of-despair type and more a mood-swings-both-up-and-down type. My wrists are not being slit as we speak, I am all out of rope, and I have misplaced that old bottle of Xanax, so don’t worry about me. I have things to look forward to. I have pictures to take, I have to go see the movie “Sylvia” tonight and have a drink with friends whom I love but rarely see, I have to nag the Fiery One into installing Photoshop, I have to commune with the rabbit otherwise known as Gordon, I have to dye my hair to a rich shade of dark brown, and I have to rustle up some cold medication to beat back the snot that is settling inside my head. I know that some of those things are on my list of things I use to fill up the hole, but they are also great diversions from the ass-end-of-January blues. It’s the 31st of January anyway, so today it ends, and tomorrow February begins, which is also an evil month, but it is oh so much closer to March, which is not entirely without its humanity.

I have a couple of questions regarding this Libya thing: what does the United States do with the nuclear weapons materials that are handed over to them? and, do we really want a world in which it is okay only for the United States to have all the materials for making nuclear weapons and no one else?

A harsh play about honour killings in Turkey is helping to educate the public there and hopefully effect some change.

It’s January, so the annual Bloggies are in full swing.

Read this blog about the 2004 United States presidential campaign coverage from the Columbia Journalism Review. It's got what you're looking for.

Ever wanted to confess something but had no one you could confess it to? Do it at group hug.

This is too much fun. Go to this site, hit the "use it" button, and paste in whatever text you want. It will decode it to reveal hidden messages. The section about my one-on-one meeting from my last entry revealed this message: the plan is ready we can go.

Aw, a baby dragon. How cute!

Fat is (or is becoming was) where it’s at for women in Mauritania.

I am honestly fresh out of things to write about. I could go on with a “Facts and Links” section, but I don’t think I’m in the mood for that. Oh, wait, maybe I am. I have just hit on an idea. Now bear with me:

Non-pornographic Boobs Facts and Links (these links are in bad taste and may still be inappropriate for work):
* In the past at Give Boobs, you were given the opportunity to help a college girl get breast implants. She has since achieved her goal, but the site is still kind of fun (in that silly, people are sad kind of way).
* You have all probably seen this already, but it’s worth a revisit to see how well you can tell the difference between Moobs or Boobs. I’m terrible at it.
* This is not exactly serious, but check out the history of boobs.
* Whoose Boobs – “America’s Number One Quiz Show”. (Warning: this site has audio).
* This blog is dedicated to news and stories about breast implants.
* “Boobs: An Owner’s Manual".
* British model, Jordan, seems to be having a difficult time in the jungle with her boobs.
* The use of silicone implants dates back to 1963.
* For some good boob facts, go here.
* Google is trying very hard to get Booble.com to cease and desist.