I AM AWESOME
January 31st, 2009
New purchase:
This is Gross
January 31st, 2009
I take the skytrain to work and so every morning I walk down Quebec Street to get to the Main Street skytrain station. On Friday I nearly stepped in an enormous blob of vomit on the sidewalk, orangey and gooey (pizza?). I was sort of zoned out listening to some Nick Cave and thinking about my clients so I didn’t see it much in advance. The best part? The big black crow hopping around in the mess, selecting a particularly large chunk, and hopping off with it to eat.
AAAAAAAUGHH!!
I gagged and did that cat-about-to-barf “hurk hurk” thing, but managed to keep it down by sternly reminding myself that if I barfed into someone else’s barf I’d probably die.
Oh my god, did I ever tell you about the cat barf? OMG! Okay. When I first moved out of my parent’s house it was to a basement apartment in Chilliwack with my ex-boyfriend (different from last post’s ex). I had a cat, a crabby black creature called Midnight, who of course came along with me. My roomie also had a cat, a sort of goofy bimbo grey tom called Chip, but Chip didn’t move in straight away for reasons I can no longer remember. It was about a week until Chip arrived, and I guess the transition was pretty stressful for the little guy because he got terrible diarrhea for the first couple of days.
So on Chip’s second morning I got up for work (I was a gravedigger at the time – true story!) and was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of yogurt when Chip sauntered in and took a big, loose, runny poo all over this pile of newspapers that was against the wall behind me. God, the stench was terrible!
As soon as Chip laid the slick, my cat Midnight moved over to it and gave it a sniff: sniff sniff! And promptly threw up on the kitchen floor. Then Chip sniffed the barf, and started to eat it!
AAAAAAAUGHH!!
I’m sitting there with a mouth full of yogurt while Cat Excretions Opera In Three Parts played out in under a minute! Gargh!
The moral of this story is, of course, never have roommates.
Of Limited Interest To Others
January 30th, 2009
Night one, Husbandless: I am listless and bored. I did go out and watched Slumdog Millionaire at a friend’s place, and it is awesome and you should see it. (Millonair!)
Now I’m at home and enjoying something truly awesome: I’ve rediscovered Nomeansno. This is a band I used to love with that deep abiding passion that certain music can inspire in a person… and then it all got ruined when the individual I associated it with ended up being an ex-boyfriend instead of a boyfriend and, well, you know how that is. I listened once in a while but generally didn’t have the heart for an immersion experience. But it’s been, what, ten years? And at some point you have to move on. And rediscover the music you love.
I’d link to a video for you to check it out but they’re a local BC band and sort of punk rock so they don’t have formal videos as such, just a lot of fan shots taken at concerts which all sound like crap. I have found this one track I like in acceptable format, but it’s not CD quality, alas. (There are some others on that site but none I particularly like – what are the odds?)
I wanted to link you to my favourite of their songs, but I can’t find it online. And anyway it isn’t really representative of most of their work, I guess, but The World Wasn’t Build In A Day gives me shivers down the spine every time I hear it. Every time! I can’t explain it… there’s just something about it that kills me. Kills!
Anyway… this is certainly only interesting to me (and possibly Toren, who also likes Nomeansno – but is not an ex-boyfriend), so I’ll end here and go to bed.
Okay, here’s one more track I like.
Poker, Randi, And Fromm
January 27th, 2009
So it’s been a busy couple of days. We hosted poker, and somehow that turned into a full day of puttering – grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking. The evening was fun and my dad took second place (Husband took first!). I of course just hovered about the periphery drinking rye and ginger ales and chatting up the folks who busted out as they did so. Dad stayed over and the next day we just hung out together which was very pleasant.
And then last night we went to UBC to see James Randi speak, which was a lot of fun. It was a keynote speech and therefore more conversational than I might otherwise have expected, and though there wasn’t really much in the way of new information for me, I was still quite pleased to see him in person. I could have seen him much closer and more personally if we had stayed in the bar later – after the speech there was a meeting of a local group called Skeptics in the Pub downtown, and though we left early and missed it, Randi showed up there! Drat my rotten timing! (You can see a wicked picture of Randi from the pub here on Puck’s blog.)
Anyway… all is not lost. I’m just finishing up a lovely little book by Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst and sociologist) called The Art of Loving1, from which I reprint this quotation:
The practice of any art has certain general requirements, quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry, medicine, or the art of love. First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if “I am in the mood” may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the pracrice of this particular art (say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it is that of discpline in one’s whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discpline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to “relax.” This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but presribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.
- Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper, pp. 100 [↩]
Up Early
January 25th, 2009
Project Readjust To Work Time is coming along well. I actually had a pretty good sleep last night (no thanks to you, Internet, and your lack of comments on the relevant post), which is impressive because I was getting all anxious around tooth brushing time. This is the true fiendishness of insomnia: worrying about not being able to sleep prevents one from sleeping. Fiendish!
Husband is working today and had to get up at 8, so I got up at 8 too even though my bed was warm and toasty and much nicer than my living room, where I am now. I could have loafed in bed for at least another hour but come Thursday I have to get up at 7, so, you know. Best to stretch out the suffering over a number of days. Responsibilty and maturity and all that.
Warm toasty bed. Mmmmm.
Warm toasty… living room? This is where the magic happens people. All your reading enjoyment comes from that laptop on that table. In that room. But not always with those piles of laundry. Notice one of Husband’s famous piles of papers – there are about six thousand of those in our office.
On today’s agenda is preparation for poker night. I don’t play myself (or anything else! Ha!) but I do supply the food and drink so I have to go to the store and get supplies. Today I’ll be putting together veggies and hummus, chips and salsa, and possibly a chocolate cake if Safeway carries nine inch cake pans.
Relaxed
January 24th, 2009
Today I shredded the office documents requiring shredding (everything with our names and/or other identifying data – we shred before we toss) and I guess it stirred up a lot of dust because I am all sneezy now. But! The office is looking pretty good. We can see the carpet again.
Also, I got through all the laundry, vacuumed all floors and washed the hard ones, changed bed linens, tidied the main areas, did all of Husband’s billing, read for my course, prepared dinner (pasta and salad), and even managed to fit in a tub. I’m feeling quite satisfied with my efforts, I must say!
I do love days when I get all my shit done. Now I’ll read a little Morse before bedtime, and that’s that!
My Dad
January 24th, 2009
My dad will be at poker on Sunday night. For everyone who is coming who has also read about him here… can we all just pretend you know nothing? Like, you could say, “Gee, I heard you were sick, glad you’re doing better!” but not “Gee, BV wrote online about how you totally drive her bugshit, what did you think about that?”
Okay? Is it a deal?
Emoticon
January 24th, 2009
Can someone explain what this emoticon is supposed to mean: <3
In case my font makes it look weird, it’s just a lesser-than then a three. I’ve seen it lots of places. To me it looks like testicles on their side.
Mother Effer
January 24th, 2009
After a veeery long stretch of blissful, glorious sleepishness, I am flat on my ass in insomnialand again. If I wasn’t so tired I’d kill myself. I have four days to turn this shit around before I report back to work on Wednesday. Help!
Here are the things I do:
Systemic: set bedtime and wake up times, enforce rigidly (though the wake up is a bitch – I can sleep like a baby between 7 and 10am). No napping. Create bedtime routine. Avoid stimulants in the evening. Darken room and turn on fan.
Tactical: change to another bed (in my case the couch), rotate or flip pillow to find the cool spot, perform exercises to manage anxiety or anger related to upcoming exhausted day at work, get some chocosoy, hate self, hate Husband (would you believe he breathes all night long? I know!).
So far no results. Please to advise.
Fascist?
January 23rd, 2009
I have a couple of comments to get back to folks on (and will soon – a bit pressed for time) – but this one was very thought provoking to me so I wanted to reproduce it here. I edited, but the original is down there for anyone who wants to read it.
Honestly, and I mean this with no malice, I think you’re over-reacting to the ‘argument.’ I really think that tip-toeing around with overpoliteness can kill open discourse before it happens
I thought this was a very good point. Maybe I’m getting too fascistic over politeness. Is it an ideal that squelches debate? I’m interested in peoples’ input. What do you think?