La Kaa-enta! October 28, 2007

it is dark on the third floor in America and i am surrounded by the lumpy forms of my sleepless mom and grandma.

times like these and times like those i wonder why and how and my oh my!

Ok so the long and short ( I met a guy from Vietnam named long on Thursday!) of this whole situa is that I’m stuck in Middle America this weekend and there were people leaning over overpasses supporting Michael Moore. And I learned how blood-relationy I am to a whole bunch of really loony Americans. And how much they love their dog (enough to talk about dear old Coco for two hours straight apparently) And how exactly haggard Kristen at the front desk of the La Quinta Inn can act when she’s “ready to HELP you!”

It was five hours in a car with my grandmother and mom who found it entertaining to talk through the entire hour and a half border line-up (“that woman on the AM 730 was right AFTER all!”) by analyzing every single aspect of the waiting and the cars and the people in the car ahead of us and those idiots on Zero Avenue who budged in line and the drive ahead of us and…shoot me. At the border crossing. PLEASE!

Then Tacoma. Billboard and Taco-dome city. Our relatives live in the middle of nowhere on 34! Acres and have a house straight out of the Spring 1978 Better Homes and Gardens Issue. But she’s sweet and he’s “gone” (Alzheimer’s unfortunately) and their son is home from 14 years in Los Angeles and talks like an American and LOVES every little thing we do and says “MAN!” excitedly every 4 seconds and loves to say our names as if we’ve just won an Oscar. Strange mannerisms and strange folk and angelfood cake with double churned chocolate ice cream.

But in the end the old relatives are innocent and harmless. And have the shined up souls of five year olds. And when you hug them it feels as though they have no bones at all and are simply cardigans wrapping up bundles of 90 year old flesh, which creases just like folded paper apparently.

Also I have appropriated an eye-twitch of endearing proportions and cut my hair off.

Christmas cometh.

We’re Pretty Much Doing the Same Stuff As You, Gals. October 26, 2007

You’re taking a pee. Trying to look nonchalant, and at the same time, focusing all of the powers of the universe on the scratch in the white tile three inches away from your eyebrow. Eventually, that gets boring, so you look for other entertainment. You glance down quickly, make sure you doing it right. Try and figure out if the plumbing company’s name is Sloan Royal USA, or Royal USA Sloan, or USA Sloan Royal; when they go around like that in a circle, you can never tell. You compare size with the guy beside you. I often have the bigger vocabulary, but there was once that someone outwitted me with ‘Pontificate’. Sad day for us all.
It’s always a disappointment when you walk into the guy’s bathroom and there are 25 stalls and two urinals, incommodiously crammed into the drippingest corner of the room, where two guys standing shoulder to shoulder will be lucky to avoid molesting the other, let alone avoiding dampening the others spirits, as it were. I find myself thinking, at these moments, that the job of designing a Men’s washroom is the one job that women are not suited for, other than being King. It’s like a guy being a nanny. (Brendon, Daniella and Agnes.)
Does anyone else ever think about how much they want a spherical Velcro lined room in their house?
It’d be a nice place to read, you know, upside down on the roof; just let your arms dangle with the book in them … solves all of our arm-propping problems.

Give me an ‘F’, Give me an ‘R” Give me things that shouldn’t be called ‘limits’ for $500, Trebec October 24, 2007

Have you ever driven at the speed in which the authorities would request that you drive? Have you noticed that I am specifically not using the term speed limit? Did you guess that it is because signs that say that you ARE, in theory, driving 30 km/h slower than you are in the world should not be called limits?
I drove the ‘limit’ once. It was like I was s bookshelf in the middle of the road. Cars were screaming past me on both sides; 3,000-year-old women in Oldsmobiles – understatement – were flipping me the bird, policemen were laughing and doing donuts around my car, whole soccer teams in Escalades were blowing around me on the sidewalk of 49th, the mothers in the front giving me the look they might give someone who’s in the process of molesting one of their children. I saw the 8-year-old girls in the back mouth, “what the fuck” as they veered back onto the road. It goes without saying.

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That I was scared. That’s the last one I help you with

Sweet Nothings October 24, 2007

There’s a hole in the driveway, dear Liza, a hole. The construction workers must not have realized the repercussions of excavating the only exit to the residence and that alone makes me laugh (they’re installing more water pipes, which, apparently puts traffic flow and going to the bathroom or anything else requiring running water, on the backburner for the day). People are stupid! The whip and sprinkles of the situation were the pricks hoping to get their vehicles through a pedestrian-sized space and pulling up to it and looking confused – like they hadn’t seen two gaping holes until they got there – and dramatically hoping someone was going to help them. Hee. The new hole is like four meters deep, and the original one rivals most cliff faces scaled only by experts with belay ropes… even a freaking monster truck can’t take that on, so wishful ambition with your two-door Hondas, dumbasses. They inherit that title for being residents of Kelowna and living on campus only to go home every second day, thus the car (?). Living ten minutes from home for an exquisite fee doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since bus passes are included in tuition, but I guess what will be will be. Dumbasses. All in all, that was fun for me as a spectator, and as a pedestrian. Oh, the idiocy.

Fright: I did my first bar shift today. My buddies (and customers) were nice and supportive and understanding and other synonyms but Starbucks is way too convenient for people and their 153 degree drinks with 3 and one quarter pumps of syrup and unicorn pixie milk. Like, GEEZ. (Now, I am a Latte MASTER!) The greatest thing, though, is the training which for me included invading a closed store in the mall after hours. Like as in, the store was closed, and the mall was closed. Running around a darkened, deserted mall is a fantasy of mine second only to storm chasing. AND I GOT TO DO IT BEFORE I TURNED 20! – I have made a list.

So, with a mall at my disposal and a fifteen minute break, I made a list of things I wanted to buy. As a non-shopper, this stands categorically as new and exciting. These things to buy are: an umbrella, a backpack, apples, shoes, that hat that does that thing, pyjama pants that don’t do that thing, and books. I now know each thing I want to buy and how much each thing costs, but I cannot (say the word thing ever again) buy them all immediately because I paid UBC $300 on debit for letting me not stay and I have to recover from that for a while and wait for the strobe lights over my bank account to move on, so I intend to spread out my purchases over the time I have left here which serves the purpose of my acquisition of said articles as well as something to look forward to when life is dead. Additionally, Starbucks owes me $200 and they’d better get on that before Backpack Day. Yesterday was Umbrella Day. Overall, I like having a drawn-out shopping project.

There were four of us making thirteen drinks each at the unpopulated mall. Janitors and repair guys walked away gleefully with unwieldy handfulls of coffee and I’m sure their night was made young again. I bet those Christmas decorations pretty much hung themselves (yeah, umm, hello October. We’re going to completely overlook you for the MOST lucrative marketing holiday).

Try Passion Tea.

Prune, Prude, Same Difference. October 24, 2007

Gosh it was a beautiful day today. After my lunch-break-to-end-all-lunch-breaks lunch break, I had planned on going to Chapters and giving them a piece of paper containing what is, in the colossal brain of the Corporation, my soul. Later tonight, I’m going to apply for a more cheesy, more cakey job that I think might actually recognize my ability to be a human being. In such, I, in a state of utter idiocy, more like augmented idiocy really, a state of idiocrity – ooh, or idiocracy – wore a coat to look like a preppy college student, when, in fact, we know all too well that I am a duck. I’ve given up on good writing.
As I stepped into Hell, it started clunkily and I pulled out into the world. It was hot. When I was driving over the bridge, I thought it was foggy, but it was just smog. My Bio teacher, Frank (This information can be used in Trivial Pursuit,) told me that people from Northern BC call Vancouver the ‘Big Smoke.’ As far as I see it, it looks mor like the ‘Big Noxious Gas and Fromaldehyde Vapour.’ It was a sunny day, and I was in a black metal box with a roaring engine, mirrors and large glass surfaces. Needless to say.

Here’s a question: (here it is:) Why do people STILL feel the need to express their social insecurities with brightly coloured skimpy clothing? I have told some of you, I’m sure, of the ballet or yoga club (that I think is actually the “let’s all wear absurdly revealing, pixie coloured spandex singlets” club.) Well, as I re-entered the campus today, I saw a herd of them strutting – I use this word specifically, as I could see their BONES moving in what is medically known as ‘the strut’– and squaking loudly, ( I will remind that this group is even parts guys and old women) and basically being chimpanzees. Am I completely mistaken in feeling that my analysis of this group’s underlying purpose of giving the members a gimmick to suplement their feeble characters is affirmed? This is somewhat paradoxical, but the fact that they must parade –if there was a verb for ‘circus’, I would use it here – around wearing their atrocious garb and hold meetings where they sit and chat wearing their atrocious garb for the first week of school (only!) in a courtyard where the 300 people lining up for the bookstore can look in on their ‘meeting’ just shows me that it is far more important that they are seen wearing their attrocious garb than it is to do whatever it is they do in it. I have no problem with them wearing spandex, or even bright spandex, or even (reluctantly) mandex, but it is the way this culb carries themselves as a group that reminds me so of a gang. And, in my opinion at least, is a gang not one of the surest forms of insecurity? The dependence on the other members of the gang means that these people are living with an identity that exists only as a group. And even then, isn’t “loud, colourful exhibisionists” kind of a shallow identity? I thought I left this all behind in Highschool.

Isn’t needless to say kind of a silly term? If it is, indeed, needless, why do you have to say it? By the by, the end of that sentence was, “I was hot,” but I think that goes without saying.

We’ll talk about that one next time.

I wake up lonely October 23, 2007

I asked for jugo de naranja but the waitor gave me coctel de camarones. My mother apparently parle courramment in spanish too. She ordered pastel de manzana. She offered to share some but I’m not really an apple-pie gal. To my left, a shadow. Future-ex-boyfriend. Il me met en colere – boring man should not travel if he isn’t going to be excited about anything. I ran off to the beach and engaged in a debate why speed-dating could very well be a natural technique to meet other lonely souls in a certain age group – and penguins can proof my point!

That is a summary of my brainactivities.

I begin to hate debates.
These are the topics we have covered so far in French 212 (Oral class):
1. Are we still judged by our looks?
2. Is speed-dating a good way to find marriage partners?
3. Reincarnation.
4. The paranthesis of life. (=inexplicable irrational actions out of the character)
 

These would be such interesting topics in our group. At least just as discussions.
In my highschool-cohort context, they become arguements over pathetic points.

Absolutely no one understands when I say “that is an invalid point because it is too subjective, or at least relative only in our culture background.”
Ok, so I rephrase. “we should avoid (boring) certain words that are really quite ambiguous, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘normal’.”
Then I emphasis. “the fact that we’re arguing whether is “good” makes the topic more controversial than it is.  This is too ambiguous.”

Why? Why is it so hard to accept ambiguity?
Because we’d have nothing left to try and figure out?? That’s not true, world! It just means we have more to understand and find out.

“Yes, but to ME, speed-dating is un-natural and just icky.”What do you mean? what do you mean?! Have you been speed-dating, 18-year-old girl?

An Apple a Day keeps the Crazies Away. October 22, 2007

My parents are precious. Let me tell you about Saturday Morning. Mother Gordon wakes up to her alarm at 6:30am, oozes slowly out of her slumber , glances at the clock and bolts upright; “Kev never came home last night,” she says, startlingly.
“Well, I thought I heard him come in,” says her husband in grog, “yeah, actually, didn’t he stick his head in the bedroom and say something?”
The woman flies out of her bed and into her 20 year-old terry cloth robe and soars out of the bedroom, across the living room and opens my brother’s bedroom door. She immediately storms back out of the room, and says to my dad, “Kev isn’t home.” She then walks over to the phone and phones my brother’s cell phone.
Kevin wakes up to a vibrating sound beside him, picks up his cellphone, glowing, vibrating and reading “Home” on the face. He puts the phone down and goes back to sleep in his bed. In our house.
My mother, not getting an answer, presses (what she claims was) “redial”. As the phone rings, my dad’s cellphone across the room gets a call, and she whizzes over, holding the receiver to her ear with her shoulder, she quickly picks up my dad’s phone, checks if anyone is there and not getting a reply, puts it down, assuming she hadn’t got there in time.
After waiting for an answer to her call, she furiously hangs up the phone, and just as she is going to race over to my brother’s friend’s house in her white, haggard robe to give him a good lesson or two about answering your phone, my brother walks out of his room, and exchanges places with my dad, who was in the bathroom during this frenzied phone activity. My mother informs him that he “got a call.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m not sure, they hung up before I got there and I was on the phone.”
Dad checks his recent calls. Curiously…
“It says the call came from inside the house.”

Precious.

A Tope Prison. October 19, 2007

I was walking in a FRANT, (there should really be a noun equivalent for frantic,) my brain was coming out my nostrils, trying to wrap itself around the Langarallel Universe I had stumbled blindly into from the staircase that came out of the back of the Professor’s Wardrobe, evidentaly. I strutted out of the stairwell with a heedless swagger into the beigity of the 3rd floor of Building A, aptly named for the most common letter in the alphabet. I was in a hall. In this hall, there were 700 green doors, each plastered with one frame of a yellowed comic from the Province 60 years ago, a motivational ‘teacher’ poster featuring some African Savanah teeming with animals and lightning and a million other things that no eyes would ever fall on for more than a second to find the number to the green door.
The numbers. THE NUMBERS. They go something like this in that particular hallway: 65,67,69,71,75,77,81,84,86,88…1,650;1,654. That is a pattern I can tap my feet to! Though, I would not so much be tapping as randomly stomping the ground as a Chimpanzee or Cow might. I ran to the end of this hall. There was a junction. Oh, lord, the junctions. I looked up at the black sign, and the numbers seemed to be in the Greek alphabet. Damn me for not getting into a Frat. I stared at his sign as if it were a 15 foot tall Satan glowering at me in the middle of the hall, speaking softly to me, “Go down that hallway, or I shall bring upon the World all the plagues of Man, and unto thine head shall be the pain and anguish of a million crying harpes, who call out,’Save me from the God of Fire, SAVE ME!’” So I took that hallway, labeled something like, “65-89, 72-31 —>”. Where was the Pentagram?
Suddenly, I was in a place I knew. Walking, I called out in my head the landmarks; “Yes, there are the windows into the courtyard, there’s the hall that I cross through the center of the building from the stairwell on the other side, there are the glass blocks on the wall that lead into the little alcove, and there’s my…what? NO. What?” There was a wall where my classroom door was yesterday.
I had only read the very beginning of ‘Diary’ (Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Fight Club’,) but this was pretty much the jist of it: (gyst? gist? jyst?) The guy renovates rich people’s homes as well as creates demonic shrines of angry poetry in one room of the house, and then drywalls over the doors, and hopes that the Richsteins don’t miss their Summer Home’s East Wing Guest Kitchenette and Breakfast Nook. Some cult, derived from Chuck’s book — like those ‘Fight Clubs’ down at VAG — had spirited away my biology classroom. Either that, or, as I found, stumbling and stammereing Keith-Richardsly to myself down the hall to the window openning into the courtyard in the Center of the building, I was on the 2nd floor, not the 3rd.

I was too scared to climb the stairs. I was afraid that I would cimb them and end up on the 2nd floor, and then Forest Whitaker would come out and tell me all about my endless universe of 2nd floors, here in the Twilight Zone. I would rather he had come out as Idi Amin.

wait…they don’t love you like I love you October 18, 2007

hi.

I am currently living in a cloud world, swathed in pyjamas and very successfully procrastinating against doing any sort of studying for my upcoming Geography midterm. Lately campus life has been sort of a haze and for no good reason either. The newness has worn off and I am slowly coming to realize the extremity of having 4 whole years of schooling to go. I go through my motions and talk to someone new every day, but it seems like all I ever think seriously about is the future. Which is exciting as of late, as Daniella and I are planning on moving in together in January if it’s possible. So lately my mind has been covered in rent prices and lease agreements and bankbooks and cheques., all aspects of life I’ve never really thought about before. Shows alot about my mindset. Last night Irene and I saw a really fascinating movie about China and materials and recycling at the Norm Theatre at UBC. I was so impassioned by the whole idea and the things they set forth that I wanted to just buy it on the spot and watch it everyday to avoid sinking into midset where you forget about important issues like these until someone reminds you again.

Constant conciousness seems to evade me.

Cheers.

Flame Boy(s)! October 16, 2007

Last Thursday was the last time something awesome happened. (That’s kind of a lie. Some concrete across campus exploded Sunday night, causing loss of power – internet – and cancellation of Monday classes.)

Last Thursday some genius on the first floor burnt perogies and sent a quilt of smoke throughout the first-floor wings. Simultaneously, on the second floor (where I lead my desolate existence) someone of equal or lesser intellect thought microwaving popcorn for 37 minutes would result in a sensational, buttery treat. It’s not like time comes in metric and imperial, how does a mistake like that happen? Smoke billowed like a carbon party. Meanwhile, I sat locked out of my bathroom and having to pee. Then, events coalesced and my urine and I went outside to wait for 48 minutes while things got sorted out. Afterwards, my friend showed me how to pick the lock to the bathroom, which is now my new favourite skill and seeing as my roomie suffers from not being able to unlock doors, I get to practice it often and can use it as survival joy.

Speaking of positive sentiments, people here cannot do their jobs, even if they have names on their doors embossed in that immortalizing brown and white plastic. I went to a career advisor to get HELP and was directed to [embark on what I expected to become a chase involving feral poultry starting at] an application office, and from there was directed to a recruitment office. This was fun, because I got a lot of information but all in form of conflicting answers to the same question. To solve this mayhem, I phoned a guy at the top of the hierarchy whom I assume has his name emblazoned on his door in that funky darkened gold metal plate stuff because I got an answer and an explanation, but seriously… gale force exhale!

Everything is worked out now, and I just need to deal with the anvil that is my soul pleading with me to not make it go to class. It’s hard to be motivated when all forces of intuition and gravity are against you. Some serotonin would be nice.