Adventures in the Café

Who Ever Thought...?

That I'd be responding to reader mail. But I am. Right now.

My ode to DB has generated some questions, along the lines of "what the hell were you talking about?" So I figured I should let everyone in on the joke.

A friend of mine was adamant that he receive a blog entry all his own, so he got one with every experience I had personal knowledge of in it. Specifically I am referring to the following:

DB was going out on his first ever date with a new boy, who's a lawyer. They were meeting at Tim Horton's and before he went, DB decided to use some self-tanner to make it look like he actually got out of doors once in awhile. What he didn't know was that this particular product contained some glitter. He only discovered this under the fluorescent lights of Tim Horton's as he reached out to pay for his coffee. He was glittery all over. What do you say at that point to your date? I believe DB said nothing to him about it, but said "oh FUCK" to himself.

The other element of the poem refers to a random French Canadian boy at a club who was wearing parachute pants. He and DB got along a little.

So there we are, now you all know as much as I do, and I won't be so smug and inside-jokish ever again. Promise.

Here's a funny story.

Bex decided that she wanted to explore the dating world a little more closely and, despite my Swimming With Sharks entry, went about her merry old way with Lavalife. Since she was so new to this process she only got as far as creating a name before deciding to quit for the evening and marshal her forces to come up with a winning profile. Imagine her surprise when she logged in the next day to see half a dozen hits. She hadn't put up a picture, there was no profile, what the...? Then she really thought about the name she'd given herself. Then she laughed until she peed. She'd used her initials, you see, and unfortunately "BJ" means something different to different people. When you call youself "BJ gal" on Lavalife you're pretty much guaranteed to become the most popular girl at the party. And boy was she ever.

An Ode to DB

In my eyes you see you, you
You
Over and over again
Oh my shining one.

Reflected in my own
Eyes
On your new stylish glasses
The casual, less funky pair
But still, so very now.

When you dance away
Sparkles
The light dims a lot
And I would feel loss.

But for the knowledge that
Hammer-pants
Aren't enough to keep
A friend from straying.

More Random Thoughts and Updates

‘Cause of….the fun!

Okay, so I’ve become more or less addicted to the Amazing Race. Is there nothing Jerry Bruckheimer can’t do? The man can’t stop giving. First with CSI (Without a Trace is very good too. It took me awhile to remember where Anthony Lapaglia was from. I kept seeing an image of him in my mind saying “Really?” and that’s all I had) and whatever else he’s done and now this. He needs to make a show, and Aaron Sorkin needs to do the writing for it. Hell, while we’re at it, Benjamin Bratt and Bradley Whitford need to star in it, with Jennifer Garner hopping in every once and awhile to kick some ass. I need a cigarette.

Tonight is my first Pilates class at the local community centre. Hopefully they’ll be able to begin the process of excavating my abs from the flab they’re lovingly ensconced in. I was also trying to take Jiu Jitsu but they called to tell me that it was cancelled due to lack of interest. This might be for the best. The last time I took it I kept hitting people outside of class in what, I felt, was a jaunty matter. No one else thought that it was quite so jaunty.

The wicked job I applied for hasn’t gotten back to me. The cutoff date for applications was September 3rd and they haven’t called to interview me. Since it’s the government it might take them a bit longer to get their ducks in a row, but still. Things are not looking good for our hero (me). In another interesting turn of events my current boss found the application for that super job which prompted the most massive invasion of privacy I’ve experienced since I asked my mother not to read the postcards I was sending to my friends from our family vacation and she did anyway. Not only did my boss feel it was appropriate to search my desk to make sure I was being “organized” she also thought it would be helpful to go through my emails. Some of them were to friends (99%) and so her findings prompted her to hold me back from an in house promotion. All of this is inferred knowledge as I’ve never been directly confronted and only have third hand information; however, the source is reliable. So kids, learn from my example and: delete often, don’t send personal email from your work account, and don’t leave anything filed away neatly in your desk for the casual observer to find.

It’s now Friday and I’m finishing up this post, so I can tell you that Pilates didn’t go down. They decided to change the start date to next week. Did they decide to tell me? Not so much. It’s like Broadway Jazz class all over again. In grade five I was taking jazz and I showed up one Saturday morning for class, but no one was there. There was one other girl there so we went to her house and I tried to contact my parents, which I was unsuccessful at for several hours. Then the jazz group was in the paper the next week. It was like they had rejected me and then were bragging about it. I never went back. I am going back to fucking Pilates, but not until I bitch at them first. The real kicker is that I asked the girl at the front desk where the class was being held and she gave me directions to the room, but shouldn’t she have known that there wasn’t a class taking place? Hello!

Did you guys read Velcrometer today? M. Giant had a piece by the associated press about this man in a trailor park who hit his girlfriend with an alligator. The fight broke out because she bit him in anger upon discovering there wasn’t any more alcohol. He then proceeded to throw beer bottles at her, and then, finally, hit her with the three foot alligator he had been keeping as a pet in the tub. Ah, l’amour.

I am very pleased to report that Sliced Bread 2 is doing really well. There are lots of site hits, and when M. Elmslie has pimped the site to people they’ve responded very enthusiastically to it. As they should. It’s a great story, and he writes very cleverly. Y’all should be reading it if you aren’t.

It was G’s birthday on Thursday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY G! Tonight, we’re gonna kick it old school. We’re going for dinner and then to watch her friends’ band play. It’ll be a time. But God tomorrow won’t be. I don’t know why I agreed to this. A friend of a friend asked me to go to a wedding. I won’t know a soul there, I barely know the person I’m going with. I need to take some sort of course on developing aggression, I’m way too passive. It’s easier to say yes to something and be uncomfortable than it is to say no and do what I want. Granted, you should do some things you don’t want to do, but this doesn’t apply to going to weddings with virtual strangers. Why am I that girl? Somebody, help me, help me please! Where is my spine, dammit?! The children are right to laugh at me.

Is it wrong that every time I do something, or think about doing something now it’s all filed away as future blog fodder?

Is it wrong the most of the hits on my new site counter are self-inflicted to see how many hits are on my site counter?

If anyone has any suggestions of what I should be for Halloween I’d appreciate hearing about them. I’m looking for something relatively simple, but still cool. Also, if anyone has any ideas of where I can get fifty copies of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for less than twelve dollars a piece on DVD I’d appreciate hearing about that too.

And here I’d promised to only use my powers for good…

Onward and Upward

This is the first September in a long time where I haven't been going back to school, or else planning on going back to school. Even when I took two years off to work and travel and save for the next step I knew I'd be going back. As far back as I can remember I have been a student, and now I'm not. It's an odd feeling. I'm no longer part of that flurry and excitement of gathering supplies, buying clothing, moving into a new place, buying textbooks, finding my classes, and so on. It's both a relief and a source of sadness.

I spent a great deal of time in elementary school and high school trying to persuade my parents that I didn't need to go. I tried especially hard in Scarborough where school was scary and I was tormented on a daily basis. My reasoning was that I already knew more than our next door neighbour, and she seemed to be doing fine, so why did I need more schooling? This argument horrified my mother, as it no doubt provided her with images of me like Sandy: a thirty year old baby factory with vacant eyes and a huge chewy mole on her chin with a giant hair sticking out of it. I wasn't helping my case.

Thinking about going back to school makes me think about everything I learned, the way I spent those many, many years. You know, it really doesn't seem like all that much. This became painfully clear last night when I was trying to do some mental math in Staples. It took me a good twenty minutes to sort out how many envelopes I needed and whether or not I had enough money for them. Finally, I had to pull out a scrap of paper and the only pen I had. When you push down on the top of the pen a man wearing a pair of briefs loses them, and all is revealed.

I don't remember much about what I actually learned in school, post-secondary included. None of it really matters; school is a way of killing time and building character and learning to play the game of fitting into society. You learn to read, write, add, subtract, make fun of those different from you, how to gossip and not get caught and all of those fundamental things, but I'd like to know how colouring and filling out numerous graphs about precipitation across the provinces helped me to achieve any of my career goals? And Shakespeare, why was it mandatory to do a play every year? How has that helped? One could argue that every assignment was an exercise in mental gymnastics, that it simply teaches children how to think and solve problems. I wish someone had taught me about budgeting, and about how much money I needed to start saving during high school in order to not have monstrous debt when I graduated from university. Or how about a class that forced you to read and discuss the news every day, not just random events, but every day going through major news stories around the world and dissecting them for bias. That would have been so much more useful than memorising the contents of pemmican.

My university courses were even more questionable, and I paid for those! Every time I picked courses and told Val what I was taking he said it sounded like a round of Jeopardy: Sport in Antiquity, the Rise and Fall of Athens, Roman Revolution, a Zoological Perspective, Writing: Gender and Bias, Frontiers of the Roman Empire, etc. The wierdest course was Serial Murder. They didn't teach you technique or anything, it was a Sociology course. The textbook was a good read with lots of vignettes about the various killers. Was it Edmund Kemper who drove around with his mother's head in the car, and kept cutting the feet off prostitutes because of his foot fetish? That knowledge has also come in really handy. Thus far, the most useful course was the Psychology of Death and Dying. It takes you through the grieving process and also teaches you techniques on how to deal with the terminally ill and what you can expect from them (in terms of behaviour, it’s a given that you can expect them to die). The textbook was pretty depressing, but by and large I learned a lot that is both useful and applicable.

Even though I was terrified every year the first day of school came around, and I still remember how that terror felt, I’m missing being in school. Now that I’m all gainfully employed I feel kind of like I’m not really working toward anything. Maybe that isn’t exactly true. I have goals, I want a house and to eventually work from home, and to write a book and all, but these aren’t things I can sign up for and do in a set amount of time. They all depend directly on me and my ambition. I’m not all that ambitious, but I’d like to be. Maybe if I paid out money to write a book I’d do it more quickly. Not wanting to pay for another semester of my thesis was what prompted me to get my arse in gear with that.

I don’t miss math, though, or science, or group work. Oh man does group work ever suck. I was always the one who ended up doing the bulk of the work while everyone else flirted and joked. Now everyone who reads this is going to think I’m ugly. I’m not, I’m cute. Honest. The last group project I remember doing was on deforestation for Science in Society. We were in the library, and I was working with popular boys and my stomach was making the loudest and most alarming noises ever.

It’s okay though, I mean, I miss it and I’m nostalgic but also realistic. If I’m poor now, and boy am I, I can just imagine how destitute I’d be if continuing on for more education. There’s something to be said for digging yourself out of that sink hole of debt. I’m working on it, it’s a slow process, but it’ll happen. Probably a lot more quickly if I got going on that literary masterpiece I’ve been meaning to write. Stay tuned.