Fix

I would be eternally grateful to anyone who would bring me a coffee to the FH before 8 o'clock tonight. Eternally.

Not Even Joking

Today, for the first time in over 10 years...
I tucked my shirt into my pants.

Things need cheering up today so here's a song of the day -- to which I command you all to listen! It doesn't matter who sings it (as always I recommend Billie Holiday), just listen to it, and think about someone:

"The Very Thought of You"

The Weekend in Point Form

I have been away from the site for the past few days because I had myself a long weekend. To avoid an excessively long and involved post (and contracting tendonitis) here are the most interesting and relevant points (those I'm willing to publish anyway -- a girl's gotta have some stuff that's just hers), chronologically:

- went to Guelph
- saw my parents who had just returned from adventures in Europe
- had family lunch with a few of my many cousins
- took my Grandma out for dinner
- asked her how she met my Grandpa, because I didn't know and felt that I should
- let my Grandma take me out for frozen yoghurt
- helped to wash my dog
- went shopping with my mom
- had dinner with family and TM
- went to Toronto
- got up too early
- people-watched in the food court under TM's work while drinking a very large coffee
- had lunch with TM
- cat-napped with a cat!
- had dinner with TM and MH (don't forget to wiki wiki)
- got to K-town very late
- got stopped in the hall by housemate...
- went to bed too late
- slept too late

Ta dah!

Selling In

You may have noticed I took the ad off the top of the website... yes the adsense experiment is over. In about 8 months I made a whopping $1.79, some un-negotiated percentage of which I have to give to TM anyway, and then I got a GOD-RELATED ADVERTISEMENT on my website. Obviously I should cuss the guy out just a little less, he's starting to make his presence known.

Anyway, they are kaput, since clearly I am not destined to be the next dooce.
*sigh* guess I'm going to have to start training that monkey after all.

Instincts

Today as I was leaving work for lunch, I found a tiny baby bird on the front steps of the FH. At first I thought it was dead and then it gave a great lurch and extended it's little beak out in an open-mouthed cry. "Oh my god," I exclaimed and ran back into the building.
What followed was a coordinated rescue attempt involving the entire populace of the FH standing on the front porch while I ran back and forth from the porch to the computer doing a flash google search on how to save baby birds and relaying my findings.
"Pick it up and keep it warm in your hands!" I said breathlessly. Then "This website says you can put it back in the nest, or keep it warm in a shoebox with nesting, but you have to feed it every 15 to 20 minutes from sunrise to sunset."
I was running around the building grabbing things - tissue, a ladder, a camera -- with a strange sense of urgency. I really wanted it to live. It was so tiny and so feeble-looking, and so determined to stretch its head to rub against M's thumb when she cupped it in her hand.
When I was in grade 3, the group of girls I walked to school with and I, for a time in the spring, became obsessed with dead bird burials. The first one was completely unplanned - just a little bird, perfectly intact, lying dead in our path on the way home. I insisted we give it a proper funeral, and so we rolled it in a bit of newspaper and I carried it home to present to my mother, who successfully hid any disgust she might have felt at my morbid offering and allowed me to go ahead with my plans, even letting me bury the bird's embossed shoe box in the back garden.
Then there came a second bird, and a third, and soon we were seeking them out on our way home, and I'm pretty sure we gave our group a name associated with this activity - although now, 15 years later, I can't remember what it was.
And yet, seeing this bird lying there helplessly sprawling it's little half-formed limbs, the same impulse overcame me -- but this was one I could SAVE and not bury.
According to the advice I found on the website, we decided the best course of action was to try to put it back in its nest. I had a moment's hesitation wondering what would give it a better chance at survival -- re-patriating it, or watching over it 24 hours a day. I couldn't decide, but the last option sounded highly impractical. So, after two attempts and a call for reinforcements, we got someone tall enough to see into the nest and place the bird back there with a gloved hand.
I went for lunch, and came back a few minutes later and could still hear the mother and baby up in the nest, chirping away.
But then, about half an hour later, the department head came in from lunch and said casually "There's a dead bird in front of the door."
I was out of my seat and into the hallway right away. "No! It's not dead is it? It fell out before, it's still alive..." But when I opened the door and knelt down to look at the tiny form that was now right on our doorstep, I could see that the straining and breathing had stopped. It hadn't been able to survive the second fall.

The Coming of Sound

I was reading this plot summary today for the archive, and it made me sort of wish that we were still living in the silent era. Then I REALLY would have wanted to write scripts for a living. They were so much fun!
Now, it just seems to be tedious... people have to waste so much time TALKING and it has to make SENSE... you can no longer just send your main character off to East Africa to run a brothel, after her auspicious education at a convent school in Germany comes to a close -- because critics might have a problem with "credibility."
BO-RING.

Reminder

Fashion sling shot with which to shoot all those who pull up in cars at the stop light outside my bedroom window while BLARING very very bad music. It has now happened three times in a row.

Striking a Chord

"She walked past wrecked gardens that were petal-littered, everything rained down onto gravel, walked home down Sunnyside past children who where playing in cold little groups at the fronts of verandahs, passed by four little guys of nine or ten as she was walking along deep in thought on the subject of her life and what she would do with it ("What'll it be then, madam?" "One rye and lithium." "Right you are, madam, one rye and lithium coming right up. . .") when one of the little boys experimentally sang out to her, "Hello, bitch!"
Although she knew that these words were no more unfriendly than the barks of an overexcited and even friendly little dog, she was too preoccupied to think of a clever reply and so she only hurried on by, speaking almost in mutter to say, "Hello, bitch bitch. . ."
But even this small acknowledgement seemed to excite her tiny tormenter, she could hear him cry out to the others in a squeaky and thrilled voice, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what that lady said? I said hello bitch and she said hello bitch bitch, did you hear her?"
She turned on them to speak to the boy who'd called out to her. "Honey, why don't you just try to grow up?"
After a moment of stunned silence, they all followed behind her, dancing and chanting on their cold little stick legs: We don't want to grow up! We don't want to grow up! We don't want to grow up!
She supposed she could tell them it was a universal lament."

~Elisabeth Harvor, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart

Headline Suggestion for Toronto Star: "It's really, really hot."

(Actually I haven't looked at the Star in the past couple days so that may very well have already been used)

How hot you ask? Rather than give you a metric reading, allow me to paint the picture of hotness. Let me vicariously impart to you a little of the hotness of me (and I am speaking temperature-wise... don't worry, it's an easy mistake to make).
It's so hot that the first thing I do when I get home from work is take my clothes off. Now this isn't an unusual thing for me. I usually take my clothes off whenever I come home and get behind a closed door, no matter the season, or the temperature in said room. The difference here is that normally I put clothes back on after I take them off. Sweatpants to be specific. I am a great fan of sweatpants at home. I won't wear them out, but man, I love a pair of sweatpants in the house. But now it's so hot, I just come home and sit in my underwear until I'm required to leave the room again.
It's so hot that last night when I was eating the ice cream (in my underwear) I purchased in my emergency foray into A&P (NOT in my underwear), I made no attempt to escape the drips from the melting frost on the outside of the container. I let them drip and slide down my legs.
It's so hot that I bought flavoured water because it was all that they had at the store. The Culligan man chose a heat wave, of all times, to be late in our delivery of water, so there's no water in the water cooler, and it's so hot that the water out of the cold tap isn't cold. It hits the air and becomes instantly tepid.
It's really, really hot.

In other news, I have surpassed the photocopier in intelligence, having today fixed a jam which required a screwdriver -- an implement which, it turns out, the almighty copier couldn't handle itself. It covered my hands in toner and burned the tip of my finger to spite me and my mastery of its parts, but I fixed it nonetheless. The shredder stood nearby and chuckled, and I fed it a CD as a treat.

Also my boss and I spent several minutes this morning discussing the finer points of Blade Trinity. I knew I couldn't be the only one in the world who gets such a huge kick out of Ryan Reynolds saying "You cock-juggling, thunder cunt!" Awesome.

And now it is time for me to do something useful with my overheated self.

Song of the day:
Into the Fire ~ Thirteen Senses

Sarcasm is an art form

The headline on today's Toronto Star:
"Nothing is Safe"

Shit, really?

And here I thought it was supposed to be a news-paper.
You know, a tell-us-something-we-don't-know-paper, and not an admire-the-emphasis-and-typeface-with-which-we-can-state-the-obvious-paper.

Thanks guys.

(It's the one thing at which I truly excel.)

In Accordance with the Excess Bullshit Elimination Program

About a month ago, after a particularly frustrating conversation with a "friend" of mine who seems to get no greater joy than that which he gleans from belittling me constantly, I began to wonder why I put up with that sort of crap.
I understand that there is a certain amount one must put up with in life -- it's a condition of being alive. However, I also tentatively believe (I say tentatively because I haven't completely thought this through, and there are socio-economic discrepancies to the global application of what I'm about to propose) that for any bullshit you do put up with, the payoff (in either material or spiritual returns) should equal the energy you put into dealing.
And so the Excess Bullshit Elimination Program was born. It's not dissimilar to the hedonistic-living attempt I made about a year and a half ago, but I think it will turn out to be much more sensible. Basically it involves the discontinuation of all putting-up I do that does nothing besides pissing me off and playing on my need to be liked by everyone. Therefore, the aforementioned individual is off the list. Also, any future putting up will be carefully weighed before being engaged in. I'm pretty good at this already, but I think I could be better. If you're one of those people who can't say no when someone asks you to do something -- you could be better too.
I expect it will also involve a great deal of ignoring and attending: ignoring those things that are bullshit-ful, and attending those you think may later be good for your soul.

Things ignored today:

Bitchy girls with bitchy looks on their faces when they clearly have nothing to be pissed off about, except generally having to be in proximity of people to whom they perceive themselves to be superior.

Things attended today:

Conversation between father and surprisingly articulate small daughter -

F: So do you know we've had some news about your new school? Did you know that?
D: Y-eah.
F: You're going to be in the morning Kindergarten class.
D: At preschool?
F: No you're not going to be in preschool anymore, you're going to be in kindergarten.
D: Oh. (pauses for a second) I understand what that means. Morning kindergarten. But afternoon preschool right?

Vegetative State

Yesterday after work, I spent the hours from 6:00 to 9:00 lying on my bed watching a movie and talking to JHR on skype. And then I went to sleep. And slept the exhausted sleep of one who has been without normal REM cycles for almost two weeks. I woke up feeling, not like I couldn't be asked to get out of bed, but like the possiblity was actually there.
Despite this sense of restoration, it took me three hours and a large cup of coffee to realize that I'd put my right and left contacts in the wrong eyes.

This totally explains it

Why I go through so many bobby pins

And Meri would like me to mention that she has finally obtained her parking pass. You may all now commence the celebrations and drinking (although not while in posession of a car with which to use said parking pass)

Hello, my name is: R2

Today the department adopted a new shredder, a foot and a half tall on four little wheels. We wheeled him around the office. Then he bit my finger. Then we made him a nametag.
And then we anthropomorphized him.

As Promised: Why I Like C's House Better Than My House

At my house, I have one room which I get to make my own. I have my red chair by my window, and my glorious bed, my polkadot lamp, my pink table, a huge stack of magazines with the pages turned to short hair pictures, my chest full of nothing but shoes, my notebooks, my artwork, my page-a-day knitting calendar... my stuff. I feel very cozy in my room. The rest of the house is still slightly alienating to me. It's like an apartment building. There's nothing I can do to infuse it with any character. I have an Equality brand beef pie in the freezer, and three bagels. I haven't investigated the inhabitants of my shelf in the refrigerator in about two weeks. I keep meaning to, but it seems everytime I turn around the garbage can is missing, or full, or tied shut. The burners on the stove smoke, from whatever was last spilled on them. The lights are always on.
At C's house, every room is full of character, full of stuff. There are necklaces strung up by the sink in the bathroom; matching plates on the table; a butcher's block beside the stove; an herb patch by the back step; a sectional sofa; a deep front window; a jar full of rockets (candy) on the coffee table. The cat drinks milk out of a bowl painted with fish that came from the Epcot centre; chicken comes with Swiss Chalet sauce; milkshakes are made with fresh strawberries; and popcorn doesn't go in the microwave -- it goes in a pot. Afterwards it gets seasoned.
Last night I finally realized what it is - my house is just a house. C's house is a home. After enough time spent moving through enough crappy renting options and shady apartments, that becomes really important.

Did You Miss Me?

Of course you did.