so, this work thing... no blood so far!

after returning from my spectacular trip to new york, i started my new job at an international but edmonton-based engineering and planning company. i was thrilled on day one to get a spacious cubicle of my very own (with windows!), my very own computer, a chair with lumbar support and access to unlimited stationery. there's a candy jar, friday donuts (from a good bakery), unlimited tea and coffee, social events galore, once-a-month feed-the-homeless, once-in-a-while bake-off, inappropriate humour from various co-workers and an atmosphere of busy conviviality. overall i'd say i'm happier than a pig in shit, and feel like this work is exactly what i want to be doing if they figure i'm a good candidate for future full time employment.

i am still at the point that i'm excited about being able to wear heels to work (heels! to work!),  to paint my nails (nails! coloured and shiny!) and wear pretty clothes (no more scrubs!). i'm sure that gets old eventually, but then so does coming home covered in a fine mist of blood and saliva, you know?

i have learned more in the last three weeks than i have in the last school year. because they don't really have a planner summer student program in place (unlike their engineering department which hires a whole bundle of sweaty pimple-faced baby engineers every year) i, along with another summer student, get to work on actual real live projects instead of stapling the fuck out of shit and bringing coffee to high power execs.

i have so far worked on some important municipal planning documents, edited important regional planning documents (editing! squeee! i love to do it and they love that i love to do it!), had meetings coming out my back end, and been loving showing up to work every damn day. the fact that it's a five minute walk from home just makes this all the sweeter.

so - remember me? crying at the start of last semester, lost and alone and confused and wondering if it was all worth it? it is.

piss and vinegar

friday evening we went out for drinks with friends, followed by dinner with mr. monkey's colleagues, followed by the possibility of a fire with other friends still. by the time we dropped off the colleagues and drove home, i realised there was no way in hell i'd be capable of attending the fire which was set to start around 10:30pm (a.k.a. my bedtime). i told mister monkey to drop me off at home and go, despite his increasingly loud and dramatic yawns. he came in, took off his pants*, putzed around the kitchen for a bit and then followed me to the living room.

mr. monkey (yawning dramatically): i have decided to stay here with you instead of having fun. even though i am wide awake and full of energy.


* he always takes off his pants when he comes home, even if he only comes in for a bit**. it is one of life's great mysteries that i have long since given up trying to comprehend.

** a bit of time. a bit of TIME, you dirty*** minded poultries!

*** if it was a bit of somethin' somethin', then i would hardly be puzzled by the pant removal, now wouldn't i?

eat your veggies

earlier today:

mr. monkey: monkey! you have such a beautiful head! it's like a radish!

potato

we stopped for a wee macchiato at the italian centre and saw the television screens at the cafe broadcasting* the latest in papal madness: crowds cheering, pope waving, babies being offered up for blessings and so on...

mr monkey: the pope! i like the new pope! he looks like a potato!

which, in my mind, is as valid a reason as any.




*in italian, so i have no idea what they were talking about. all i saw was the rock concert screaming, the babies body surfing and the pope waving his hand from inside his circle of the men in black.

little ol' moi in the big apple

spent an absolutely fabulous few days in new york with my good friend d. we walked our feet into a blistery storm, drank too much wine and slept not nearly enough, but gods above, we laughed enough to make up for everything. d lives in brooklyn's park slope, in a gorgeous high-ceilinged pre-war apartment. because i am taller, she asked me to help her change the lightbulb in the kitchen. i took one look at the little step-ladder and realised it was far too short to reach. while she looked for a spare lightbulb, i grabbed one of her two barstools and started to pull it to the middle of the kitchen.

moi: hey, can i use this? is it safe to stand on?

d: hmmm... not sure. i suppose so.

then i looked up and realised that as she was uttering those words, she was standing on the other barstool rummaging in her upper cabinets for the lightbulb. we looked at each other and burst out laughing.

i have to say that there's very little in the world better than someone who really gets you, and i have been beyond blessed in my life with so many fabulous friends. and yes, i'm also talking about you, you know who you are!

just fine

note i left on my dirty wineglass today, so my fabulous roommate doesn't get any wrong ideas:

"this is NOT my wineglass. no idea whose glass it is. only degenerates would drink 2 glasses  1 glass of wine before 2 in the afternoon. right?"

in the defence of degenerates everywhere, sometimes a morning exam takes a whole lot our of ya, you know?

eh?

today i got an A on a project that likely deserved an A-.
the other day, from the same prof, i got a B on a project that likely also deserved an A-. is he trying to average things out or keep me guessing?

almost over, my little poultries, though how i shall get through the next two weeks is beyond me. keep your appendages crossed, eh?

salmonella of the mind

today i woke up nice and early and set off on great cerebral adventures. i had 3 projects/thingies on the go, which makes for a truly ADHD experience: at one point i had 4 PDF files open, word, photoshop, 3 indesign, and 4 illustrator files (yes, dear poultries, i've become a full on adobe whore) as well as approximately 7 different websites. there came a point sometime around 6:59 that i realised i was doing nobody any favours and should call it a night.

because my mother's been making less-than-subtle comments on facebook regarding my evening diet of  chocolate peanut butter ice cream (haagen dazs, i'm looking at you), i decided to have a salad, which is, like, you know, healthy and shit, poured myself a glass of wine and decided to watch tv.

sadly, my fabulous roommate decided to visit his parents this weekend and left me all alone while he went off gallivanting (wait, visiting elderly parents is likely not really gallivanting, is it? but still!). the problem, you see, other than missing his wit and all, is that i spent all fucking day at the dining room table, etching the curves of my still-admittedly-not-half-bad buttocks into the firmly wooden dining room chair, and if i was gonna go and watch me some nice relaxing telly, i'd have to remain in this position for a while longer. but why, quoth you, when in the basement there is a huge flat screen television, comfy recliners with cup holders and blankets and shit? well, darlings, because when no less than 4 remotes are required to turn on said television it is simply beyond me. yes, things are at the point where i cannot turn on the television by myself. even mister monkey, when he visited, took a good 15 minutes to figure this shit out, and he's a bloody engineer! what is wrong with our world that turning on a telly requires a PhD in astrophysics, huh?

so yes, here i am, still etching my ass cheeks into the oaken seat that has cradled them gently since roughly 8 this morning. 2 weeks and i am off to new york city for a much needed bit of r'n'r, but we can't think about that yet. it's all baby steps from here on, my darlings, but if i were to have a moment of madness and take a big fat wide angle goggle, i'd say, fuck! i'm almost half-way done this crazy adventure, and lo, it has been GRAND!



edit. note: i decided to be wild and watch my shows on the couch! my ass doesn't know what hit it!

oy.

you know it's been a less than stellar week emotionally speaking, when several random classmates come up and offer you a hug.

apparently i appear a lot more frazzled and/or stressed out than i feel on the inside.

then again, my interior frazzlement is nicely regulated by little pink pills: essentially i've been phoning in most of my negative emotions for the past several months. however, being a bit of a drama queen (yeah, yeah, i know you've never noticed) i continue to swear up a storm, kick things and threaten undergrads who can't seem to grasp the simple concept of two way doors, while fantasizing about sending those incapable of flushing toilets or washing their hands without spraying demijohns of water all over the counters to the nearest north korean gulag* but other than that, you know, i'm calm...ish.**


*and really, about north korea - i don't know whether i should laugh or cry, but hot damn, their beloved leader's photo ops are simply brilliant - such depth of emotion, such drama, such inspiring poses! why, it's just like a chinese communist opera!

**ok, with the notable exception of my emotional handling of the affair of the one prof who seems to have taken an irrational dislike to me (and by extension my most esteemed partner). that shit gives me anger that eats right through the little pink pills.


(a few minutes later, i told my fabulous roommate about being offered hugs and what people must surely think of my mental health. he said that perhaps it just meant people thought i was huggable. somehow i think not.)

an egg, by any other name...

sitting down in studio with j, working on a presentation this morning. she starts to unload her lunch just as several people join us.

j: sorry if my lunch smells like egg!

moi: what is it?

j: an egg.

mirror, mirror

there, in the mirror, stands a woman who is past her prime. this is something that i didn't think would bother me so much, what with all the feminist self-awareness stuff that i wholeheartedly subscribe to, but hot dog, i seem to be in the midst of a real life mid-life crisis.
symptoms - some serious navel-gazing. annoyingly so. i look and look and notice how my eyes are drooping and the smiley lines are no longer going away and the bed sheet wrinkles stay embossed on my arm skin for a long long time and instead of just shrugging, i get pissed off. because, damn it, it wasn't supposed to happen to me. because somehow i was supposed to get my very own temporal loophole and not grow old.

and yes, i realise i'm not old per se, but i am no longer young. i get more and more why people have children (or, maybe to be clearer, what use children serve in people's lives, beyond the purely practical considerations of bringing you another glass of wine when you can't get up) - when you have children, there is continuity, there is youth and your own silent slump into decrepitude is no longer quite as important. you have distractions: look, maddison is on "girls gone wild"(again)! behold, jayden has developed an oxycontin addiction! oh my, emma has won the lacrosse tournament! and so on... whereas i have merely the intellectual struggles of grad school to keep my mind's eye focused away from the slowly loosening collagen in my delicate under-eye area (as the industry calls it) and 'twould be good, if i wasn't surrounded by a group of 20-30 year olds whose firm bits and pieces make me reconsider my self-imposed anti-plastic surgery position.

now don't fret. it's unlikely that i will turn myself into a fully plasticized clone of the kardashian clan, but it's odd how much i'm feeling the slipping away of something good about myself. and as shallow as this is, it's true. i know there's more to me than a face and body but i still miss being me. i feel that the face i see in the mirror resembles me less and less and i wonder when my self-knowledge will catch up and i will see me again and not some lightly worn out stranger.

i always prided myself on a realistic self-respect and self-love, and that seems to be slipping along with my formerly firm bits. so, here's a question to all of you who are older than i am - when and how does one reach a zen-like state of acceptance?

somebody get me a travel brochure!

c and i were texting yesterday morning about a group of annoying doorknobs who manage to be 30 - 45 min late to class every single time. i speculated that perhaps it was a cultural thing before realising that clearly wasn't the case - they were from all over, really. so just natural douchebaggery, i guess.

moi: yup, assholandia is a big country with many citizens.

c: i visit occasionally. great beaches.

hats off!

i put lush henna in my hair today. one of the problems with short hair is that the roots show a lot more, and my roots, let's just say they're losing colour. fast.
i love the effect of lush's henna, but the process is arduous. you grate the henna-cocoa butter blocks, mix them with hot water, goop the resulting mess on your head, which you then cover with a plastic bag. thus attired, i came downstairs, grabbed one of the bag clips hanging on the fridge to keep the plastic turban from slipping and, having found myself rather chilly, topped it all off with a hand-knit toque.

it's almost time to go wash it all off and it's warmed up in here quite a bit so i slipped the toque off just a few minutes ago. the fabulous roommate came down to make himself a cup of tea and i showed off my plastic turban held together with a bag clip.

fabulous roommate: is that what the toque was covering up?

moi: yup.

f.r.: well, then that toque is a fashion sin!!!



i always had a secret inkling that i look fantastic in plastic.

ain't it lovely?

we're in new orleans. today we sat around at dinner, mister monkey, p and i, chatting about what p & t's 1890 shotgun house still required in terms of work. p mentioned wanting to add tin ceilings in the kitchen and dining room.

moi: i think some nice detailing would be lovely, like...you know...what do you call'ems? like baseboards, but near the ceiling! (turning to mister monkey) dude, what are they called? ceiling baseboards*?

mr. monkey (obviously not listening to me, again): what? who's lovely? i'm lovely!!!




*crown mouldings. duh! stupid 40-year-old vacation brain!

hair! i cut it! it's short!

so i got my haircut. thus begins the saddest story ever told (if you don't count the famine, war, violence and general meanness that characterises much of human history).

i've been going for a couple of years now to a nice czech lady who cuts hair out of a rose-coloured strip-mall salon of the kind catering to old ladies with tight perms. her two advantages, however, outweighed the general unsexiness of her place of business: 1. she's cheap, and 2. she's damn good. however, this time i was in the mood for something other than an expertly executed bob. i was starting to feel the need for some coiffure-mediated sex-appeal. this, thought i, is no job for mirka; no, this required someone with flair and flamboyance and fantasticity. i started trolling edmonton salons and rediscovered my man. the man whom i followed through 7 or so salons many years ago. the man whose haircuts were always inspired and made me happy and glowy and shit. in other words: THE MAN. he was back! woooo!

i booked with him and proceeded to gather photos of what it was that i wanted to happen on my head. (picture tousled, sexy, rock'n'rollishness and then a bit more sexy on the side)

then i got a call. apparently my man was going out of town and needed to reschedule. rescheduling is not something i am capable of doing at the moment so i chose to move the appointment to someone the receptionist warmly recommended.

y'all know where that is going, dontcha?

i showed up at the salon, all eager and trembling with barely suppressed excitement. to make sure things went my way, i had dressed as rock'n roll as possible to let him know i meant business. as i sat down, out of the corner of my eye i saw a viking sweeping up hair. never one to turn away free eye candy i looked and liked. two metres tall, long blond hair, swathes of pectoral and many other kinds of muscles peeking through the plunging neckline of his t-shirt.

turns out this norse god was my stylist. turns out he looks a scary lot like my cousin's behated ex. turns out he's uncertain. turns out he's of, shall we say, slightly-less-than-average intelligence?

this was the moment i realised that what i want in my stylist is swagger. i want him to be cocky! i desire from him a firm grasp of the realities of my hair vis-a-vis my face! i require that he tell me he will make me into a man-melting sex goddess and that he make it so! i demand certainty and a strong hand!

what i don't want is subservient deference. i ain't no hair professional! i don't know what'll work! all i know is that i most certainly do NOT want the hair equivalent of a minivan with stick-figure demographics on the back window, and yet that is precisely what i got.

oh sure, my classmates rose to the occasion and told me all sorts of glorious lies in a valiant attempt to make me hate myself a little less, and sure, it's hair, and it grows, but hotdamnitalltohell! i wanted to be a sex-goddess, not a soccer mom, and to add insult to injury, i feel a trifle guilty for not letting mirka have a go at my head. i suspect she'd have done a bang up job.

sorry norse god. and thanks A LOT for souring me on eric northman a little tiny bit!

back to the yurt we go

i'm going home this weekend, and was planning on inviting our lovely friends over for brunch on sunday. alas, mister monkey's table saga continues.

having just realised you have no idea what i'm talking about, seeing as i've never mentioned the table before, i must take a moment to inform you of the fact that my husband is building me a coffee table. so far, this has meant measuring, cutting, sanding, polishing, buffing, followed by a dozen applications of marine craft quality epoxy, each layer of which required 12h of drying time and more sanding. i thought i would have the table for christmas... it is now february. there still remain seventeen coats of UV protecting varnish to administer, each requiring light sanding in between.

we do not have a garage. or a shop. we have a balcony, but because the table is of a weight roughly equivalent to a herd of overweight water buffalo, mister monkey has had to do the sanding in the dining room.

because he is a thoughtful sort, he has built a tent out of poly and tarps, with an air-flow hook-up to the balcony door.

when i mentioned that s & l would be coming over and to please pick up the following food items, he agreed. the second time i reminded him to pick up the items needed he said, yes, yes, he was on it.
the third time, ditto.

a couple of days ago he casually asked me where we were going for brunch with s & l. i gently reminded him of the seven conversations we had had on this very topic in the preceding week, wherein he had agreed to purchase the comestibles required for the brunch. the brunch i was planning on cooking for our friends. the brunch we would eat at our place.

mister monkey started fuming immediately about how could i possibly have invited anyone over for brunch! we have work going on! the house is not fit for company!

i gently reminded him again of the conversations we had had, suspecting at this point that he might, possibly, not have been listening. at all.

this went on, back and forth until i exploded, accused him of not listening to me, hung up and texted him that i was married to a mental patient and i was tired of the woodworking shop in my place of residence.

as punishment* i asked him to tell s & l of the change of plans. he emailed them that night:

"I hope that you received my phone message. We are going to have to brunch out in the town on Sunday because our home is unfit to receive guests ... i have built a yurt in our living-room. Please get back to us to discuss venue options."

today i was telling my fabulous roommate about this situation.

fabulous roommate: what is the yurt made of?

moi: just poly and tarps.

fr: i thought that perhaps it was made of your traditional yurt materials.

moi: yak skins? no, mister monkey did not send away for a "build your own yurt" kit from mongolia, though if he had,  that might explain the rate at which this whole thing is proceeding.



ya know? i could have just gone out and bought myself a very heavy, very expensive coffee table and be done with it!




(who knew that in the course of several months yurts would pop up so prodigiously in this here blog.)


* as punishment because he is an anti-social type, allows me to do all of our social arrangements and likes it just fine this way

somebody throw a cocktail party, stat!

the fabulous roommate and i were taking our mental break, watching strip the city, a ridiculously entertaining discovery program (i choose not to feel guilty because it deals with a city's infrastructure, so it's almost like doing homework). today it was rome, a city built upon ruins which were built upon ruins and so on...

moi: wow! this whole city is a palimpsest!

roommate: a pali-what?

moi: [explanation given] and now you can whip that out at a cocktail party and impress people!

roommate: i need to start going to cocktail parties.


... time passed...


roommate: ah! i know that! that's quarter wave damping!

moi: a quarta-wha?

roommate: [explanation given*] and now you can whip that out at a cocktail party!

moi: apparently i also need to start going to cocktail parties.


* i did my darndest to find you a wiki link but alas, could not. i spent whole seconds perusing the interwebs, but let's just dumb it down - it's a shock wave reduction by a quarter. if someone out there can explain it better, have at'er!

when in rome...

we were sitting around before our housing equity class, talking about berlusconi, as one does, when c, our resident political whiz, mentioned that the man in question was planning to run for p.m. again.

moi: no! really? then again, knowing the italians, he'll likely get voted right back in.

c: sure! if everyone he's ever slept with votes for him, he'll win for sure!

moi: um...i'm not sure teenage prostitutes can vote. or convicts. or...nuns! hey! can nuns vote?

s: of course they can! just because you love jesus doesn't mean you're not a real person!

self-mutilation beats self-determination

after our friday night dinner and movie, my roommate and i sat around chatting. i told him about my propensity to cut myself while preparing food and mister monkey's propensity to yell at me when i do.

moi: so over christmas, i cut myself pretty badly while cutting an onion. crusty juggler had to come and mop up the blood and put a band-aid on my finger because mister monkey was raging on and yelling and telling me i had to see a psychiatrist, which i really don't get. i mean, why does he tell me i need to see a shrink?

roommate: because you are cutting yourself.

which, i suppose does clarify things a bit: self-cutting is most definitely grounds for psychiatric intervention.

pride goeth before a fall

you know just what kind of week it's been, gastrointestinal health-wise, when you fart and feel a deep sense of pride at not having soiled yourself.

going back south tomorrow, and on to new adventures in grad school on tuesday. wish me luck - 2 courses sound like fun, 1 sounds interesting, and 2 sound like i am likely to need to double my dose of the pink pills.

2013 - the year of the bodily fluids

christmas came and went in a flurry of massive overconsumption of food and wine. our poor houseguest crusty juggler was dragged from one family home to another where she sat and listened to us talk about people she'd never seen or heard of with a slightly glazed look upon her face. we dined out, we dined in, essentially: we dined. a lot. and lo, it was good.

the new years soiree we hosted came off without a hitch, though the cold i'd been fighting with regular applications of vitamin C and zinc lozenges finally hit me. after 4 hours of sleep, i woke up in the newly minted 2013, cleaned up the post-party detritus, and realised i was sick. i spent the next 2 days on the couch, nursing a nasty chest cold, hacking up my lungs and emptying the contents of my nose into an ever growing drift pile of scrunched up tissues.

crusty juggler was supposed to leave on the 3rd, but she came down with either a violent stomach bug or food poisoning and managed to postpone her flight to the following day while periodically emptying the contents of her stomach into a bucket. despite my weakened state, i was the stronger of us two (mr. monkey took off to the mountains for 2 days) and provided juice, water and emotional support.

the night before last, having gone to bed optimistically with my coughing almost completely gone, i woke up to waves of nausea so intense that i didn't know what hit me. as a result of which, all of yesterday i spent alternating my upper and my nether regions over the toilet. crusty juggler, now being in the position of the stronger one, brought mint tea to my couch while i arranged a ride for her to the airport since there was no way i'd be able to move beyond the condo. she left and i languished and napped.

this morning, i woke up stronger and most definitely nausea-free, however my cold took the opportunity to return and lodge itself in my sinuses.

so, to recap 2013 so far - chest cold -> stomach flu -> head cold. getting ready for school on tuesday? not so much. i'm awaiting my imminent conjunctivitis, ebola and pneumonia with great impatience.

merry christmas and bees

mr. monkey (looking at the best pictures of 2012): look at this! world's greatest bee covering!

crusty juggler: what?

moi: man. covered in bees.

crusty juggler: it's amazing how quickly that gets boring. even though the man is covered in bees.

dancing machine

last night, the plans and words of years finally came to fruition and lo, i went out dancing. the evening began at a local watering hole where we met ms. c.'s friends. this motley crew comprised, among others, a bison rancher and a newscaster from the best radio on the planet. i might have given in to a little squeal of delight when the latter fact came to light but i just managed not to ask for an autograph. still, he was rather pleased to not only have his name recognised, but to have me visibly glow when i gushed about ckua.

the bison rancher, a big strapping blond fellow, sat in the chair with his boots (and occasionally his socks) off and at first declined to go dancing because he'd get too hot. turns out he didn't just have fur-lined boots and wool socks, he also had long-johns under his jeans. when i suggested that those be removed to facilitate improved temperature regulation, he pointed vaguely at his crotch area and said, it's a little busy down there. silence followed until we realised that he was, in fact, pointing to the downstairs bathroom and not to the party in his pants.

later at the club itself, ms. c. opined that she'd be more than willing to dance with me on the empty dance floor if there was more base and so i went to ask for more base. when i returned, breathless and giddy, i told the table that i'd slept with the d.j. their looks of incomprehension moved me to explain that this did not, in fact, happen in the 2 minutes that i was gone (admittedly, this would have been quite a feat) but many many years ago. i felt très carrie bradshaw about all this - in all my years living in this city, i have somehow managed to evade old lovers up until now, and the feeling of sophistication was delicious. dude might or might not have recognised me, but from what i gathered at the time he was a man of many women and i was but a one.

the crowd was friendly and we danced with various youths, all glowy from exertion and lack of life-experience. we watched one young woman (let's call her "tits") simulate all manner of sex acts on the dance floor until one of the men she mounted carried her away. we wish "tits" well, wherever she may be. she might have miscalculated her venue somewhat, because this was not a meat market and she oozed all over the floor in a distinctly libidinous manner. my first thought, being me, was that this was not a floor over which i would ooze, but then again, i am older and wiser and know how much dry cleaning costs.

ms. c. and i walked home inordinately proud of ourselves for having managed to stay up so far past our bedtime and promised to do it again, and soon.

school of life, baby!

this march i turned 40, quit the career i've been in for 17 years, left my hometown and mister monkey and moved 3h south to go to grad school. by november 1st i made the decision to remove my name from the register of dental hygienists (there goes the back-up plan!). i was miserable for the first 2/3 of the school year and blissfully happy for the last 1/3. overall, a fairly eventful year:

the theme for this year, other than terrifying change and uncontrollable tears, was learning from others, sometimes far younger others.

lessons of the year (some letters have been changed to appease my paranoia):

from c, dear, sweet c, i learned that it's ok to take it easy, chill out and sometimes just do the bare minimum. as a result, i finished my first semester with not half bad marks, having also managed to watch all five seasons of true blood, which i think is fairly impressive, given that i handed in all of my assignments early. c is my tv dealer at the moment (sorry, crusty juggler, you've been temporarily replaced) and my dealer in calm. 5 minutes with c, and i breathe a little deeper. and he's only 23! who knew there was wisdom in such youth?

from p i learned that i am as deeply in the box as he is outside of it, and that it's ok. our drives to and from calgary flew by in a flurry of conversational bliss and my constant amazement at the unbridled creativity and beautiful madness that fills his mind at all times.

from l i learned that the KISS* principle really and truly works. and that partnerships can be a good thing.

from bt i learned that things can come unexpectedly and madly out of ether and sometimes it's ok to keep your fucking big mouth shut. he'd disagree about the last bit, but i think i'm right here, and since it's my blog, i get final say. i intend to take the lesson to heart and be a little more circumspect. at least in some things.

from t i learned that friendships can be put on hold and then blossom again unexpectedly, and that family and home are fluid concepts. he has made me feel at home when i didn't think it possible and has listened and talked and eaten all the mandarin oranges i've managed to toss at him, figuratively and literally, drunk and sober.

from jn i learned that some friendships go on and on and on and just get better with age.

from j i learned that sometimes one ought to feel bad about wanting to kick people in the teeth. i want to kick people in the teeth so often that i'd forgotten this is not really a good thing. thanks for the reminder!

from cn i learned that first impressions can be wrong and though we would never work on paper, on the short bus we've become fast friends. i'm so looking forward to another semester of gossip and inappropriate humour.

from k i learned (again) that appearances can be deceiving and we are all hurt and broken up inside, even if we look just fine for the company, and that it's important to go to a movie for mental health reasons at least once a month.

from all my classmates i learned that i am good at presentations. from myself, i learned that i LOVE presenting in public, even getting off on it a little, if you don't mind me over-sharing (and if you do, what in the hell are you still doing here? go! there are better places for you out in the interwebs!).

i'm sure there were many more lessons, but this is all my feeble brain is able to conjure up at the moment.

what have you learned this year?


*keep it simple, stupid!

hey! it's over and shit!

so, like, yeah, you know? as of 5:59 this a.m. (barring unforeseen circumstances, like perhaps revisiting my work and finding it wanting*) i officially finished my very last bit of work for the first semester. i thought i was done yesterday, but chatting with my classmates made me realise that the essay, a shining pinnacle*** of erudition, wit and smartypantsedness, was not at all what the professor wanted. what the professor wanted, god bless his shiny little head, was a paper written for the mayor and, let's be honest, barring the lovely mayor of cochrane who is a classmate of mine, the elected official does not always boast the most astute intelligence. at least not according to the professor. and so, having dropped the manila envelope off at the office that morning, i went and retrieved it that afternoon and decided to let the dumbing down begin.

sadly (oh lord, so very very sadly) i chose to go out for one drink. one. that was my first mistake. my second mistake involved ordering wine instead of my usual grad school beer. you see, beer is not my love. beer is a good pal. i can have one, or two, and on rare occasion, even three beers. and i remain myself. oh sure, a little more boisterous and a whole lot louder, but i remain firmly ensconced in me-ness. wine, on the other hand, wine, my love, opens up the floodgates of me. it's me squared, and as lovely as i'm sure that sounds to all you out there who adore me, let me tell ya - scary shit, that! my third mistake was forgetting the sad fact that for the past 4 months my alcohol consumption has been negligible. one glass done and a sip of the second glass in, i had his worship in stitches, and my other classmates astonished at the fact that i seemed all of a sudden totally and completely wasted as i told them i loved them (well aware of the drunk "i love you, man" that i was referencing - i'm SO fucking post-modern it hurts... no, really: it does hurt). some people left, and i ought to have looked to them for inspiration. instead, i made my fourth mistake: went to another bar with two lovely folk who will never look at me the same way again. there, in that friendly little neighbourhood pub, i made my fifth mistake, and ordered a half a litre of wine. my roommate came and picked me up on his way home from the airport which, i am certain, prevented me from making any more mistakes. i am certain we talked on the way home, but i do not know about what. i am sure i told him i loved him, cause i was on a roll. once home, we sat and chatted for a long while, then i went up to bed and made my sixth and final mistake: i took half a sleeping pill which is possibly still in me now. i jolted awake at 3:45 (some sleeping pill, that. though, to be perfectly honest, it might have been having some sort of pharmaceutical powwow with the wine and the other stuff i'm on****) and that was that.

i was up before 4:00, reworking my essay between 4:30 and 5:59, and 6:30 finds me sitting here in my flannel pyjamas talking to you. let's call that my first and second successes of the day. if i'm careful and the gods love me, arriving safely in edmonton will be my third success of the day. after that, i think i'll lower my expectations somewhat so i don't get cocky. people hate a cocky gal.

one thing's for sure - writing an essay at 4 in the morning is not a great idea, but taking an already written essay and dumbing it down for political consumption is a fantastic idea. i added bullet points, made long words shorter, cut out hifalutin concepts and even briefly considered making a pie chart with actual pie smeared on the page, but i found myself bereft of pie. i am sober and awake enough to realise that i ought not send the essay to the prof yet, on account of any residual judgment impairment. i will go home, let it sit for a bit, look it over tonight and repost it with the promised note of "dumbed down version."

and thus ends my first semester: not with a bang, but with a head-shaking, eye-rolling frustration at my continued inability to control my wine intake or verbal output.


* one's expectations, talents and grasp of basic concepts like punctuation and grammar are admittedly not at a high point at 4 a.m., with wine AND sleeping pills still flooming**through one's bloodstream

** yes it is a word. i just made it. it means floating really fast in a zooming-like fashion: flooming. come on! pass it on! let's make it real!

*** is there any other kind?

**** stuff that is keeping me from bursting into tears at inopportune moments

everyone knows cows love cherries!

a magpie is sitting up in a pine tree

it looks down and sees a cow walk up

then the cow begins to slowly and laboriously climb up the pine tree

the magpie is looking on, amazed, until the cow, slightly out of breath, reaches the branch and sits next to the magpie

what are you doing up here, cow? says the magpie

oh, i just came up here to eat some cherries, says the cow

cow, this is a pine tree, not a cherry tree! says the magpie

not to worry, says the cow, i have the cherries in a little jar right here!

mongolian mornings

you know it's gonna be a good day when the first live conversation of the day ends with you saying "i wonder what the R-value of a yurt would be."

yes, we have no oranges!

this evening in the kitchen with my friend/roommate/landlord:


moi: (offensively) you need to eat these mandarin oranges before they dry out!

f/r/l: (defensively) i had one yesterday!

moi: one?!! i eat like seven a day!

f/r/l: (laughing) i don't look at eating fruit as a competitive activity!

frosty morning

texting this morning with my grad school buddy (instead of doing project work. yes, yes, yes, i know)

my school buddy, c.: it's snowy out.

moi: it's hoar frost! i love hoar frost! i also like saying hoar frost because it makes people go "huh? whore frost? wha?"

m.s.b.c.: me too, except for scraping the hoars off my car.

whine

grad school has taught me many amazing things, none of which is as amazing as the previously foreign concept of the unfinished bottle of wine.

secrets and lies

last night we drove to mister monkey's mom's house for a late night cabbage roll extravaganza. we drove, as usual, through an abominably hideous late 90's lower-end suburban subdivision (all front garages and beige siding and cul-de-sacs). it was, to my mind, a closed system with only 2 ways in and out. little did i know...


mr. monkey: if you ever need to get out of here, you can turn right here at 130 st. it goes straight through.

moi: is this recent?

mr. monkey: no. it's always been there.

moi: and you never told me this? not these 13 years?!

mr. monkey: ...

moi: what else have you been hiding from me?!?!?

brought to you by the letter "i"

can you say "inappropriate"? i KNEW you could!

first things first, your kind comments brought happy tears to my eyes. they really did. and i am sticking with it for the time being. the Big Scary Project that was keeping a tight fist on my giblets for weeks has been overcome (and how*!) and the two projects coming up tomorrow are fun and the essay due on tuesday, well, it's an essay, so that's that.

i still can't sleep and have started seriously considering getting a wrist tattoo that says "breathe" on account of my occasional forgetting but the morning of the Big Scary Project i found myself catapulted from the depths of despair (friday night wine, i'm looking at you!) into the manic pinnacles of irrepressible giggles and this ridiculous high has remained with me all week (... wait, it's only tuesday, but i feel like i have lived lifetimes since monday so you get the idea). today started with a group meeting (i had the distinct pleasure of telling mr. monkey that i couldn't talk because i was in a meeting - ha!) after which i took a well-deserved break in our studio space.

i sit in a corner in the uncool part of the room and all the fun kids hang out across the wall, but hey, it's nice and quiet and nobody disturbs me (though i can't speak to the reciprocity of that sentiment: i do, after all, have a bit of a mouth on me). today i decided to watch an episode of true blood and, in true HBO fashion, it didn't take long for clothes to start flying off and for various unmentionable parts of the anatomy to start jiggling around in a sweaty throbby rhythmic way. i was near the end of the episode when i realised that someone coming up from behind would have been treated to the sight of me watching what appeared to be porn, in our class, during the day, sitting all alone in the dark. so yeah.

also today, i walked with a classmate to a nearby cafe where he got himself an americano misto. when i looked over i realised that instead of this, his coffee was graced with this. we giggled uncontrollably and i had the decency to blush, but neither one of us had the presence of mind to take a picture: i don't know if i'll ever be able to forgive myself.

the rest of the day followed suit with inappropriate comments, accidental crotch elbowings and the like. i blame my psychotic high, a ridiculous lack of sleep (that i plan to remedy with the judicial application of lorazepam as soon as i've finished my blogging homework) and hunger (that i plan to remedy with the judicial application of soup as soon as it's ready).

so, like i said before, it's not so bad.



*i believe my partner and i spent 1/10 the time everyone else did on this project and watching the rest of the class linger past closing time working on 3D animated scratch-and-sniff sparkle-coloured unicorns while we drew lines and squares, contributed hugely to my feeling of deep-seated malaise. we chose the simple direct route and it seems to have paid off. lesson learned: don't look at other people's shit: no good can come of it, in either the metaphorical or the literal sense.

so you wanna go to grad school...

today, in the car with my roommate:

t: i find the idea of scratch-and-sniff urban planning revolting.

and rightly so.


in related news, less than a month of school has passed and i have managed to have a full blown emotional breakdown (brought on by yoga), chronic stress-related insomnia, an A+ (no big deal, it was an off-the-cuff essay and i have always had a way with rhetorical flourishes),  daily several moments of almost giving it all up, multiple pep talks (to self), several episodes of weeping, one sustained episode featuring snot-bubbles and uncontrollable sobbing, more pep talks (to others), lots of inexplicable gas, an increasingly nostalgic view of the dental profession (when i had weekends! and went to bed early! and worked 8h/day) and a schedule the likes of which i have never experienced in my life before.

3 projects are due this week. an essay was also due on friday, but the merciful heavens softened the hard heart of an academic and he moved it to tuesday next week.

i no longer know what day of the week it is because a wednesday only differs from a sunday in the greater flexibility of the time i show up at school on a sunday.

i am at school from 9 till 7, and then work at home till midnight.

i am unhappy, lonely, chronically tired, bloated, confused, and sometimes angry.

i am drinking far too much... tea.

1 month down, 7 more to go. and then i get to do it once more.

sigh...

but, you know, it's not bad.

apples and oranges

recently, while buying my new laptop for school:

friendly store clerk: how are you going to pay for that?

moi: reluctantly.

and off she goes!

in the preceding week i worked my very last day ever as a dental drudge and celebrated said day with a ceremonial trashing of my duty shoes. it felt good but somewhat surreal. all of this, really, feels like the busy time before a big trip, a trip that fails to feel like reality until you are sitting on the plane and baby, i am about to get on.

in the last several days (when i wasn't hopped up (. . . no, wait, hopped down?) on lorazepam) i took my clothes out of my assorted wardrobes, shelves, drawers and storage boxes and laid them all out; gathered up my footwear; purchased multi-coloured felt pens and pencil crayons*, an architectural scale**, a roll of tracing paper***, a green cutting board, and a kick-ass green monster lunch bag that holds all of my colouring implements in one place, and made myself ready for the long and treacherous trek to the city of calgary where i shall make my home for the next two years.

dear poultries, the time is nigh, education beckons, and i seem to have mostly conquered the irrational fear that i shall fail at this spectacularly and come crawling back with a soggy toothbrush between my teeth and my ego shattered irreparably. complete strangers tell me i will do well. friends, too, of course, and so i wrap my belongings in a largish kerchief which i shall hang on a walking stick as i set off on this new adventure. embrace change, they tell me. well, looks like i don't have a choice, don't it?

wish me luck and i shall try to keep you posted. if i do fail spectacularly and jump off a bridge or something, i will ask mister monkey to let y'all know, ok?

kisses!



* yes, i am going to be getting a master's in colouring, apparently
** the use of which, in practice if not in theory, remains a perfect mystery to me
*** ditto

once more, into the palimpsest!

a friend's random comment recently showed me that the palimpsest is alive and well in that most literary illiterate of public spaces: facebook. i'm not certain whether the facebook team, in an unprecedented brilliantly post-modern move enabled the creation of the palimpsest or whether it was merely an accident.

what happens is that you can edit and re-edit your fb comments, and, in classic palimpsest fashion, all pre-edited versions are visible to those who choose to look for them. this makes little sense when viewed in a purely practical light - after all, the whole point of editing one's comment is to take away the typo, the heat-of-the-moment angry words, the inappropriate remark, the misspelled name, the pointed slur, the unfinished thought, and substitute the proper spelling, the witty retort, the fully formed and polished sentence that would leave one's mama proud. editing and leaving behind the electronic version of the scribbled, liquid-papered over, ink-stained first draft makes absolutely no sense, unless we see in this the oh so subtle gift of the palimpsest: thoughts layered upon thoughts, inklings half-formed morphing elegantly into fully fledged ideas, philosophical debates with the self resolved, mental disorder, step by step, evolving into cool clear analysis. or you can just insult someone repeatedly as a joke and see if they have the mental wherewithal to discover your hidden arsenal of abuse.

take this gift that i have given you, my friends, and go forth to create a palimpsest treasure trove on facebook before they fix things, leaving us all the poorer for it! go now!



p.s. i have written about the palimpsest once before but because i am pathologically technologically under-informed and the "ctrl+f" feature didn't work, you will be spared having to read an ancient post on my having once woken up with the word "palimpsest" on my lips. that's all that happened and to this day i can't explain it. still, having the idea of the palimpsest easily within one's reach tends to keep things more interesting.

hipsters!!!

i'll be the first to admit that i'm as unhip as the next person (provided the next person is very unhip indeed) but i am not totally out of the loop (ok, i actually am almost completely out of the loop, but i have once seen the loop and can vaguely describe it in a way that will make you look into the middle distance and then quickly find a reason to go away). this is what happened today:

i cleaned the teeth of a 22-year old hipster kid whose hipsterness was evidenced by his hair, glasses, footwear and clothing. he did not have a moustache but i think it was only because his body was as of yet unable to produce one of appropriately emphatic proportions. somehow or other we got onto the subject of music and, judging him completely by his hipster cover, i took a plunge and asked him about a band - a small band, an indie band, a lovely band, really, and a band 99% of people would know nothing about. he gave me a wide eyed stare and proclaimed himself a "huuuuge fan," after which, with the flourish of a magician pulling a second rabbit out of a hat, i named another band. he beamed at me. this, too, was one of his favourites. we tossed some names back and forth, gave each other suggestions and went our separate ways (me - presenting him with an electric toothbrush and floss in a baggie, him - presenting me with the fluoride he had expectorated into a small plastic cup, hardly a fair exchange). i retained a feeling of buoyancy for the rest of the afternoon - here was i, a 40 year old dental hygienist, sharing esoteric musical taste with a 22-year old hipster kid, how cool is that?

it wasn't until the evening that i had to laugh - poor kid, that initial elation at finding a random stranger who likes the same indie stuff that you do must have eventually given way to a feeling of complete horror: he, after all, shares his esoteric musical taste with a 40 year old dental hygienist! i bet he's deleting his ipod playlist as we speak.

apologia

first of all, my cousin often tells me i care too much. well, be that as it may, that's not something one can exactly turn off and on and i lack the energy to psychoanalyse myself to determine the root causes of this particular shortcoming, so it'll have to remain one of my many faults, faultlets and faultillinions. the reason i'm telling you this is so you know why the hell i'm bothering to explain myself instead of just ignoring getting yelled at by a good friend under the cover of anonymity.

so: there's this great book by william gibson. its main character has an unusually high sensitivity to advertising and trademarks to the point of having to remove labels from her clothes to prevent psychological discomfort and its physical manifestations. to a lesser, far less dramatic and sadly far less literary degree, poor spelling and grammar do that to me. perhaps i don't come out in hives but i have recently realised that seeing a sentence written in the vernacular of today's youth, including all the LOLZ, OMG's, UR (instead of you're or your) and all the rest of their sloppy sms lingo, makes me actually physically uncomfortable. seeing people abuse the english language (and polish - i'm an equal opportunity grammar nazi) makes my gut churn. in fact, it is a feeling oddly similar to watching the cast of a musical suddenly burst into a song and dance number - while i am well aware of the fact that they are not at all embarrassed to be doing this, i am, and doubly so, for their sake and mine.

and so to some "you're" and "your" are interchangeable; to me they are not and never will be. i realise i can be a bit of a bitch about grammar: i might not be as smart as i used to be (it's possible i never was) but believe me, i know. in fact, here and now i give you leave to feel sorry for me, because having this in my head is fucking exhausting. i still cringe when i recall saying "it's important for mister monkey and i" in a sentence that long ago day in vancouver and i know nobody else remembers (well, they wouldn't if i didn't keep bringing it up here). all other things being equal, i would prefer to not give a shit. i am tired of caring about this, and i am certainly tired of feeling a twist in my stomach whenever i walk by a sign that tells me "open monday's." i'd much rather feel that twist when witnessing inequality or poverty or suffering. instead, i get haunted by grammar - yes, i know how fucking psychotic that sounds, but there you have it: i feel like some OCD sufferer, held in the claws of a mental ailment that makes things of small import feel of big import, running around attempting to make everything nice and neat and correct.

so, yes, i realise there are more important things than spelling and grammar - brain surgery, gun control, world hunger, preventable accidents in the home, the harper regime's dismantling of canada, potable water in subsaharan africa, discrimination, racism, the republicans, polar bears etc, etc. but while those things bother me on many levels, they do it quietly and mainly out of sight: they only pop up to smack my psyche around whenever a particularly pertinent headline jumps out at me. i understand typos but poor grammar has lately been so ubiquitous, so pervasive that i cannot seem to get away from it. this, in light of technological advances like spellcheck and google, seems to me inexcusable. and, as i keep pointing out, i'm a bloody immigrant, i'm 10 years behind all y'all anglophones in the whole language learning timeline.

and finally, while i am well aware of my own grammatical shortcomings, i try because i refuse to give up on the idea that anything worth saying is worth saying well.

darling, i haven't got a clue!

• am i the only one who's sick and tired of summer homes in ibiza* being featured on nearly every design blog recently? i, for one, am ready to see some chic albanian villas.

• so there's that. also, we were in portugal for 3 weeks, came back 3 weeks ago and i did not blog a single thing about the trip on account of my difficulty with blogging about actual things that are actually happening, as opposed to all the exciting things that take place only in my head. so, let's get this over with: portugal was gorgeous, its people lovely and warm, it was more picturesque than a basketful of kittens which can get annoying after a while, but not as picturesque as i imagine naples or paris might be (pure conjecture, yes) but make of that what you will, perhaps it's a good thing, perhaps i need to get out more, or, more likely, i need to lay off the booze, which (to make this sentence even longer and more convoluted because, hey, so far there are no laws against that, except of course the laws of grammar but seeing as the vast majority of the english speaking part of the world ignores most of them anyways as evidenced by the ubiquitous painfully thoughtless, poorly constructed and spectacularly misspelled status updates on facebook, i will just jump through that loophole and carry on as if nothing happened (why? what happened?)**) was ridiculously cheap, plentiful and bloody delicious in portugal. if you were asking me whether i'd recommend portugal as a holiday destination, i'd say, yea, verily, go, but stay the hell away from algarve which is very much like florida on spring break but with drunken british accents instead of american, and which is a poster child for rampant, uncontrolled and butt-ugly development that does not in any way take into consideration the historical charm or geographical attributes of the land. go to the west coast instead and you'll feel like you're in portugal instead of the redneck riviera florida panhandle.

• to share our photos i just made y'all a link in the sidebar (kippered pics 2) where you can access the basketful-of-kittens level of portuguese picturesqueosity at your leisure***. can i stop talking about this now? there's some really weird dynamic here that makes me seriously uncomfortable blogging about reality. thank christ there's so much excitement happening in my brain. but i won't write about it because it's late and i'm tired and i'm cranky.

• we just got back from seeing "to rome with love"and may i just say, woody, i'm on to you! you just keep making the same film over and over again and it's getting OLD, just like your neuroses and your khaki chinos.  we should've gone to see "take this waltz" instead. sarah polley is not yet a one trick pony.

• chinese food is most emphatically not the same as korean food, which is very different from vietnamese food, which is not at all similar to thai food. if i hear one more person calling a vietnamese restaurant chinese and then saying that it doesn't matter, i'll have to resort to violence. i take my ethnic gastronomy very seriously, y'all, don't make me come down hard on yo ass.

• hormonal fluctuations can go to hell. i'd refuse to participate but my body continues to betray me. 

• and as far as corporeal betrayal goes, i have just gotten my very first pair of glasses. so far they are only necessary for reading the backs of wine bottles in the summer twilight, but soon i shall fall off the edge and careen wildly down the path towards blindness, decrepitude, incontinence and death. my eye doctor says i have 2-3 years left before we get into serious reading glasses (and the prerequisite grandma perm that seems to come with) so let's get that seeing-eye cabaña boy in training, shall we?

• inexplicably, the air is starting to smell like tequila;**** i think it's time to go to bed.

*it doesn't help that i seem chronically unable to see the word "ibiza" without hearing it in my head with that annoying lisp.

**if you noticed internal inconsistencies in this sentence, you have my heartfelt congratulations for having the intellectual wherewithal to find your way through the maze of my thinking which is something i am increasingly unable to manage. (hello grad school, hope we have fun together.)

*** warning: shitload of pictures (edited down from the 4000 i took).

**** i 'm drinking a glass of red wine, just so you don't get any ideas.

fancy!

yesterday at a canada day bbq, trying out a new vodka cooler:

j: you know it's sophisticated! it says so right on the can!

i is what i is, and what i is, increasingly, is dumb

yesterday an out-of-town friend, fp, came to stay for a few days owing to a family emergency. because of all our general laziness busyness, we decided to forego cooking and opted for pizza from our local pizza joint. because i am truly dumb when it comes to spatial imagination (wait! i want to be an urban planner? when i don't know the difference between 12" and 22" ?! let's hope the program is entirely in metric, eh?) i ordered two huuuuge pizzas, enough to feed a multitude.

moi: well, the good thing about a bigger pizza is that there are the middle pieces; you know, not as much... dough?
mr. monkey: you mean crust?
moi: christ! i'm going to grad school and i can't even remember my own name!
fp: your name is crust?

dinner! with wine! and cheese! and more cheese! and look! more cheese still!

last night we hosted yet another dinner party. this time, in the interests of reducing superfluities in our overloaded social calendar, we hosted two lovely couples which resulted in oft-hoped for social synergy: everyone liked everyone else a whole lot, conversation and laughter flowed as did the wine, and all was good in the world, at least for a night.

some time after the seventh appetizer course and before the main course, my cousin phoned me up to tell me that if i hurried, i could still catch a bit of the eclipse. eclipse! what eclipse!? needless to say, all of us (smart, educated, thinking people one and all, honest to god) grabbed our shoes and ran down five flights of stairs, down the hall and out the door only to find ourselves staring at. . . well, the sun. which, in case you haven't noticed, is rather bright. and hurty. we sheepishly squinted in its general direction for several seconds before dejectedly hiking back to our apartment (we took the stairs! to work off some of the cheese!) having accomplished absolutely sweet fuck-all in the eclipse-observing department.

i blame the alcohol, i really do: what else would cause all six of us to stampede towards an event that even a third grader will tell you ought not be attempted without proper eye protection?

gods give me patience (a play in one act with many adjectives)

tonight, on our fruitless* walk to the grocery store:

moi (a little frustrated): you know, there is no law requiring you to walk two paces behind me; you are allowed to walk by my side. why are you dawdling?  are you in pain?

mr. monkey (outraged): you know i have arthritis of the knee!!!

moi (suitably chastised): oh. i'm sorry. does your knee hurt?

mr. monkey (grinning): no.


*you wouldn't think that miso paste would be the holy grail, but alas, two grocery stores later we are as bereft of miso as we were when first we set forth.

note to self:

in the future, it might be a good idea not to make pronouncements at the condo board meeting in a gangsta-inflected voice ending with an emphatic "yo!"

(oh yes i did.)

get going on the whole memorial thing 'cause i don't know if i'll make it through the week

mister monkey was napping on the couch, so i sat in the armchair with my laptop eponymously in my lap, watching fluffy tv with my headphones on so as not to disturb him. the phone rang and, being bloody lazy dedicated to the whole multitasking thing, i picked up my laptop, kept my headphones on, and walked over to where the phone was. on the way, as is my wont, i got tangled up in the ridiculously long headphone cable, tripped, fell forward and smacked myself wholeheartedly in the face with my laptop.

it hurt. i might possibly have a black eye.

and if you think this is just the crazy creative excuse of a woman secretly beaten by her husband, let me remind you of the time i gave myself a black eye when the lunch bag carrying my eco-friendly heavy glass container flew out of my hand as i was unlocking the car door and smacked me in the brow-ridge. it is truly a miracle of epic proportions (as opposed to those regular, economy-size miracles like the weeping virgin mary appearing to orphaned children in various corners of eastern and/or southern europe) that i am still alive.

christ, can i handle grad school!? when i can hardly walk across living room without giving myself a concussion?

this is your brain on booze

saturday night, on our walk to a birthday bbq across the river:

moi: how do you say "szlachetne" in english?

mr. monkey: noble.

moi: why can't i remember this stuff any more? what's wrong with me?

mr. monkey: i dunno. . .

moi: i need a drink.

last night at the monkey shack

last night we hosted cher monsieur antoine at the monkey shack. beer was consumed, movies discussed:


c. m. a.: have you seen the film "into the wild"?

moi: is this the movie where the guy goes and dies?

c. m. a.: yes.

moi: bleh.

c. m. a.: no! no! it's very life-affirming. . . up until that point.

hey, it's cinco the mayo, which, as everybody knows, is the day for lists, and so here is one (a list):

things i like:

1. you, but not if you drive like an idiot and force me to pound on the horn and call you a fucking cunt, since i really resent it when i revert to using the female genitalia as an insult because, we all know, the cunt is a wonderful thing - it brings forth life and pleasure, and is incredibly resilient and flexible, unlike, say, the ballsack which is a much more proper insult but, sadly, does not roll off the tongue in moments of stress.

2. beer at parties. yes. you heard me. i think beer will henceforth be my liquid drug of choice on account of me not liking it that much (oooh! self-contradiction! lack of internal logic! so sue me, motherfuckers!). also, it gives me a nice reliable light high that does not degenerate into memory-loss and incoherence (or so i think) like wine tends to do. and also there's the whole lack of stomach acids burning holes into my esophageal bits. oh wine, i miss you, but i think we ought to just be friends for now.

3. potluck on our mandatory one working saturday a month (incidentally, the ONLY thing i like about our mandatory one working saturday a month). today good boss (as opposed to evil boss who brought fuck all last month) brought pear slices slathered with chevre and crunchy rounds of grilled capicola sprinkled with wonderful mystery herbs.

4. tulips

5. the shy green buds peeking from branches all over. i know, i know, the vast majority of you have already managed to get tired of all the green but here, in the arctic circle, we still know what longing is, since we spend so much of our bloody lives longing for good weather and green and growing things.

6. our condo, which embraces me and makes me happy and calm and all. i also have a beautiful floor, which i never fail to admire as i'm doing the downward dog in my morning sun salutation, because i am a. getting old and decrepit and want to forestall complete fragility and b. an annoying example of those people, you know the ones i mean.

7. chevre with pomegranate-habanero jelly

8. alone time

9. save-on-foods tuxedo cake (i will not tell you how much of a slab i recently ate, but let's just set it down, black on white, for my future self - JUST BECAUSE IT'S 40% OFF DOESN'T MEAN IT HAS NO CALORIES!!! jesus!)


things i don't like:


1. people who drive like idiots (see above).

2. our mandatory one working saturday a month which, if rumours are true, and that's the only thing we seem to be given at work these days - rumours, might be extending to two saturdays a month, because hey, it's summer, and the only thing better than having your weekends off in the summer is working like a fucking mule because your evil boss is a money hungry bastard. still, if they ask me (or, more likely, tell me) to work one more saturday, i'll just drop my grad school bomb on them and tell them they can kiss my posterior regions. booyah!

3. mister monkey's weird disappearing act (8. above notwithstanding) wherein he tells me he'll follow me home and then is gone for an hour to an undisclosed location. i suppose until he starts coming home with track marks, smelling of cheap perfume with lipstick on his underwear i'll just choose to let it go. but if all those things happen, we'll have to have a chat. and a serious one at that.

4. dust bunnies. oh the dust bunnies!

5. beer without a party. it just tastes... i don't know, not like wine?

and the word of the day is...

last night we hosted an impromptu gathering at the monkey shack. there was food, there was beer, there was intellectually stimulating conversation and much laughter. there was, most importantly, the frequent and creative use of the oft-ignored word: perineum.

in honour of that marginalised body part, and fuelled by sloshing vats of granville island brewery's robson st. hefeweizen, i extemporized the following haiku:

betwixt two holes
a lonely stretch of skin
the perineum

the best thing about good friends is that you can discuss politics, urban planning, european film, literature and the feminist implications of pornography, and then you can laugh your head off about penis jokes.

a big steaming bowl of...

just now, at the monkey household:

moi: trying to do something relatively important on the computer, whilst mister monkey chatters on, and on, and on, running around doing noisy and annoying things.

mr. monkey: blah blah blah

moi: ...

mr. monkey: blah blah blah

moi: !!!

mr. monkey: so, do you want to make a list of things to do tomorrow?

moi: yes: number one - shut the hell up!

save our cbc radio!

satan's slightly used pentagram

the last month has been a mad dash from project to meeting to condo showing to birthday festivities to stagette night to wedding to family dinner and back. although the latter few bits were actually fun, i am in dire need of time to round up the dust bunnies madly proliferating in my dark corners and the random papers of varying Importance doing the same on the counter. i wonder what it will be like if (when?) i finish grad school and am forced to join the rest of the human race in a 40 hour work week: how will i cope? when will i catch up on my gilmore girls? will i ever cook dinner or subsist entirely on donairs? will i become an even more angry hostile bitch? these are all questions that must be considered before i embark on this new adventure and consider them i shall when i get a spare second to myself. instead, let me tell you about our fancy dinner out.

on march 2, mister monkey and i celebrated the 13th anniversary of our first date, and decided to go to the restaurant where we had our wedding supper, the red ox inn, a lovely little out of the way fine dining establishment. reservations were made, good shoes polished up, buttons sewn back onto shirts and tight skirts squeezed into. we spiffed up, fluffed our collective bangs and went forth into the night.

the dining room had been renovated since our last visit there, but the ambience was still cozy, pleasant and warm and the service professional and friendly. mister monkey perused the menu thoughtfully and came up with an appetizer - five onion soup with a carmelised onion cracker. i think the poor man was expecting a cheesy concoction not unlike french onion soup. what he got instead was a big gorgeous white plate upon which two slices of sauteed leek and two halves of roasted cipollini were artfully arrayed. upon them balanced an onion cracker roughly the shape and size of a gas station coffee stir stick. the waiter swooped in and dramatically poured hot broth, fragrant with star anise and fennel, on top of the onions. and that was that. i ordered the duck foie gras, because everyone knows ducks are bastards. i also got a big gorgeous plate upon which rested a piece of foie gras the size of a medium lego piece, drizzled artfully with phlegm coloured globs of apple puree and several scattered mysterious but delicious crunchy bits. it was phenomenal. tiny, but phenomenal. the rest of the meal was a little less blog-worthy in that the portions were actually reasonable, and tasted very good. overall, it was a good night.

several days later, on my actual birthday, mister monkey picked up some take-out from my favourite vegetarian place (i might or might not have been doing penance for the evil done to ducks). the bill was roughly one third of the previous place, fed us that night's dinner and the following day's lunch and was so fantastically flavourful that we decided we were just not fine dining types. oh sure, every once in a while we can consume artful drizzles and dollops, we can admire swans woven out of organic free range chives, we can even dig the fabric tablecloths (although we draw the line at molecular gastronomy - anyone who feels the need to foam pop-corn needs to get diddled a little more regularly), but for the most part, give me cheap, plentiful, flavourful asian food, and never mind the highfalutin stuff: mister monkey and i both cook and so you'll have to work a little harder to impress us than serving us a tower of soup.

new decade

alright forty, do your best!

yes, this should be a meditative post about my last decade, here on the threshold of my new decade, but you know what? i slept poorly, it's been snowing every bloody day for a solid week, and i'm off to work through the snow, so you'll just have to wait until a better time.

oh, and the big news that i teased you with a while back? i applied for grad school. if i get accepted, this september i shall embark on a master's degree in urban planning at the university of calgary, 3h away from home and mister monkey and all the wonderful people that have made my last year so awesome. still, it's been a long time coming and if i don't do this, then i'll be scraping calcified twinkies off people's teeth till i'm 80, and frankly, that prospect makes me suicidal. so there.

thank you for your patience, my poultries, i've been busy, and, if all goes as planned, i'll become busier still, but i will try to toss the odd post here. toodloo!

joke stolen from my father's facebook wall, translated swiftly and shared joyfully

 -george, why so glum?
- you haven't heard? fred's dead!
- what?! really?! how?!
- the day before yesterday, he came home, had a stiff drink, lied down and lit a fag and the bedding caught fire...
- he burned to death!?
- no, he had time to open the window and jump out...
- and he smashed to death?
- no. he had called the fire department and they pulled out a rubber jump net and he jumped into it.
- and it broke?
- no... he somehow bounced back and flew back into his house...
- and he burned to death!
- no! he bounced off the window frame and fell...
- onto the sidewalk?
- no! the firetruck was covered with a tarp. he hit the tarp, bounced off and flew back through the window.
- and died?
- no... he fell, bounced off the jump net again and fell back into the apartment!
- you're fucking joking! so how did fred die?
- they shot him: he was starting to piss them off....

mad mad men

we were watching mad men last night, an episode where don draper says a rather curt goodbye to yet another mistress and we got to talking about our personal favourites. mine's joy, i don't know why, but there's something rather charming about her. mr. monkey was really taken with suzanne and could not understand don draper breaking up with her over the phone.

mr. monkey: i don't know, if it was me i'd go over there. i'd do it in person. i'd give her some money,  i'd say "please...please...go buy yourself some cake."

which, i'm certain, would fix everything.

animal, vegetable or mineral

tonight on the LRT:

mr. monkey (looking out the window of the train): hm, is she walking with a child or a dog?

moi: well, that depends: is it on a leash or in a stroller?

cold and alone in the night (in theory)

i am a member of the condo board in my building and tonight we had our monthly meeting. the meeting took 3 hours (we were discussing the various kinds of stupidity that cause people to flood things, but that's besides the point) (yes, there's a point) (wait for it). i got home and found mr. monkey fast asleep, clutching my cell phone. when i went in to give him a kiss, he sleepily handed it to me, all toasty warm:

moi: why are you sleeping with my phone?

mr. monkey: it was ringing. and i got scared: i thought you couldn't get into the building.

moi: why didn't you answer it?

mr. monkey: i forgot. i fell asleep.

moi: so i'm still standing out there? cold and alone?

mr. monkey: don't worry, i'll get you in the morning.

because wine lubricates social intercourse and who doesn't like well lubricated intercourse?

numbers rule (except words rule more):

3. when it's -45C with windchill and you're wearing no hat and your sexy little coat is open and your shoes have stiletto heels, you don't look lovely: you look like a complete moron.

7. when it's -45C with windchill, furry earflap hats are sexy.

1. why? i'm still not sure but the guessing keeps life interesting.

3/4. apparently some people do not realise that fractions denote dividing one number into another. i have it on good authority that some of these people will be administering your chemotherapy drugs in the near future. time to invest in a good solid firearm, non?

25. i am in the middle of changing my life dramatically. once i get shit done, i will tell you all about it. but - it's not divorce (dudes! i LOVE my mister monkey!) and it's not a goddamn baby.

57721.4 i am sitting on my couch, listening to my music and it feels good. as i said to crusty juggler earlier "really, all one needs for true happiness is the right chemical cocktail floating through your blood stream!"

9. who doesn't like baby animals? even though sometimes the cuteness makes you want to kick someone. hard.

18. can i be done now? ok, then. i'm done now.



[free-floating asterisked bit removed by author]

edit. note: the asterisked bit at the end that meant nothing can be attributed to one thing and one thing only: drinking and writing (wait, that's two things! i always said i was bad at math.) i have now erased it to avoid confusion, thank you to crusty juggler whose sharp eye and quick wit have saved the day. phew!

another crusty juggler chat (don't worry, c.j., all the embarrassing bits have been deleted!)

moi: i only like to embarrass myself...and stupid people (regarding the whole portugal debacle*)

yay! my show is on!

crusty juggler: which?

moi: the signal, on the radio, my first love!

crusty juggler: ah, i naturally assumed tv.

moi: you would.

crusty juggler: i can't seem to bring myself to listen to the radio without anything visual going on...like the tv on mute or something. it's a sickness.

moi: you are a strange one. you can do shadow puppets!

crusty juggler: i'm very visual. like a dude. dude's need constant visual stimulation according to the studies. why did i put that apostrophe there? nevermind.

moi: YOU!!! bad girl! your so dumb, lol.**

crusty juggler: hey!

moi: that's ok, once when talking to g i said "for mr. monkey and i" and then just about had a coronary.

crusty juggler: but you were likely the only one who noticed.

moi: nope. i made such a stink about it the entire restaurant noticed. had i been japanese i would have fallen on my sword... or fork, as the case may be.



*mr. monkey's facebook status tonight: "where is portugal? does anybody know?" to which those out of the loop responded earnestly, while those in the know (crazy joan, i'm looking at you, dahling!) referred the reader back to my book club for answers.

**i certainly hope that at this point in the proceedings i need not tell you that neither the "your" nor the "lol" were seriously meant, right? good, i thought not.

an emoticon for a banana ) (or (, depending on which way it is facing)

i don't see why i ought feel bad about being an intellectual snob - you don't see the vociferous ignoramuses of the world expressing any kind of shame, do you?

i'm sorry, what did you just say?

on facebook, on our private book club group chat, but a few short hours ago:

ms. implants: hmmmm. the book is not available at chapters ....

moi: but it is at the library.

ms. ten thousand dollar chest:  i don't do library.

and then my head exploded again because this woman is a teacher. of children. she doesn't "do" library but is willing to spend 5K per breast (what? me? judge? mais oui! everyone needs a hobby!)? thank christ my ovaries are shrivelled up and dusty because... well, because... sorry, interwebs, i'm stumped. to have to explain to a grown woman that portugal is not exactly in south america is bad enough; to have to find out that a teacher doesn't "do" library is grounds for immediate removal of self from society of said teacher. book club, i think this is good bye.

oh book club, book club, book club, what shall we do with you?

at book club this saturday:

moi: blah blah blah something totally irrelevant blah blah blah, blather blather blather so we're going to be spending almost 3 weeks in portugal this summer blah blah blah
book club hostess: where is portugal? is that in south america?
moi: ... um... no, it is in europe.
book club attendee: yeah, where is it? i totally missed social 20.
moi: ... it's next to spain. it's in the south. warmish bit of europe.

and then my head exploded, because, motherfucking fuckety fuck, we're not talking about social 20 here: we're talking about GODDAMN GEOGRAPHY!!! sweet jesus on a pogo stick, it took all of my self-control (the reserves that were not being used on not drinking, seeing as i was driving and we were in the midst of a 10 metre snow dump that night) not to look around and ask them if they were fucking retarded or what. i didn't. but only just.

honestly, i think i need another book club.


p.s. the rest of the night was spent talking about one attendee's brand new breast implants. like i said, i need another book club.

merry, merry, merry!

hey, all my wonderful poultries - i love knowing you are hovering around this here virtual gathering spot.

may your days be merry and bright and filled with all manner of love, delicious victuals, laughter and polyester reindeer sweaters and may the coming new year make all your dreams come true! may you be healthy, wealthy and wise and may it just keep getting better and better!

(thanks to crusty juggler for the festive pictorial contribution, courtesy of andrew bell)

why i possibly need to ease off the wine or never ever chat/skype with friends when drinking

moi: hi, i'm here with my friend and we're having wine. how you is/ crusty juggler: what the what? thought you were out!
moi: back here now. showed your pic to my roman friend/  want to say hi? crusty juggler: ok, errrr Hi! moi: get om sjkyle
crusty juggler: i'm not familair with S.J. Kyle, but I'll try moi: skjyle?  what the fuck? crusty juggler: that's the guy!
then we talked on skype (apprently) then 10 more minutes elapsed.
moi: sorry dude, i'm drunk. she's gone now and i have no recollection of phoning you.  god, bboze is bad  or good  it makes you think happy unicorn thoughtsand rainbows out the ass crusty juggler: when did you phone me? you mean skype? if you mean skype which we just spoke on, then I think you should get thee to a hospital for alcohol poisoning moi: shut up!!!  phone/skype  whatevs!
is all techonlololology crusty juggler: okay! you do remembe the past 10 minutes though, no? moi: what?  why?  what happened? crusty juggler: we conversed on skype  we said important things moi: oooh!  imporrant thangs  !
crusty juggler: dude! you are so wasted! moi: that sounds... impirrant  possibly  i haven't had much to drink lately crusty juggler: maybe that's why T was ignoring your calls... moi: so we only had 1.5 bottle of wine, IF that crusty juggler: sometimes it only takes a wee bit!
moi: especially if you haven't had any booze in like a week  which is moi  hard to believe, i know  i like my roma friend, she is nice crusty juggler: EXXactly. anyway, Rome friend sounds nice - although I hope you only showed her the good photos of me moi: also, she is not drinkig as much as usual. you only take GOOD photos  fuck! crusty juggler: Right!  anyway, i hope she's not a bad drink influcence moi: you is seriously nice looking what with your metabolism and blue eys and all crusty juggler: i am pretty great. moi: don't know which way that goes. you are!!!
crusty juggler: uh-huh. moi: uh0h crusty juggler: what'd you do? moi: uh - HUH crusty juggler: oh moi: whaddya mean? crusty juggler: this is a great conversation. transcripts please! moi: wanna talk like for realz?  oh yes. crusty juggler: ok, lemme get on it moi: fuck.  call?  skjpeuuueee? crusty juggler: yarp  yarp again moi: yarp