Wombs of golf balls refusing to sit on tees occupy my mind. And the last three hours of my existence. Oh dear, I thought that was hyperbole until I looked at the clock… concerning. Also grass and Stephen Fry. I want to write him a letter. I think I’d reference that ridiculous joke about how the greatest surgeon in all the land couldn’t save a patient because the patient was the greatest surgeon in all the land because that relates to His Greatness. All the fabulouses and brilliants shouted up by the… underbelly… can only pertain to Mr. Fry if constructed by the greatest wordperson in the land. Which he is and I am not. Somehow I need to speak to him if only to hear him do a word ballet. My letter needs to attract attention without attracting the perks of a TRO. Perhaps I will mention that him calling us would make Mike die of happiness, and then I can grind his bones to make my… to make paint. He’ll understand.
December 19, 2007
I saw Suzie again tonight. The hours were minutes. Happiness is in the ability to recognise a singular thing when you have it. I have a singular and beautiful friend. I have many singular and beautiful friends. (Here, I refer to the collective.) We don’t lose time. I am happy — lost in my own way, yes, and sad for certain endings, but grateful to the ends of my toes for all of you.
I feel so scattered this year. As I tried to explain to Suzie, the people I see on a daily basis, the friends I’ve made this year, are mostly at least six years ahead of me in their lives. As much as they are wonderful and I have a firm belief in connections regardless of external factors such as age, there is a part of me that feels a bit lost, like I don’t know how young I still am. I want to remember to be young. On Saturday night I saw a band called Greenbelt Collective perform. I remarked to Jordie, one of the guys I was there with, that as much as their overwhelmingly joyful and hand-clappy music may leave me cold, Greenbelt succeed admirably at staying young. He nodded and said, “Honestly, they all seem younger than you. I forget how young you are sometimes… you’re so mature.” That comment saddened a part of me.
I haven’t written anything but letters since June. I haven’t done art in even longer. Both of these used to be indicators of where I am, and maybe that’s why I feel like a shadow of myself. I don’t even know where I am.
Richmond pot pourri December 16, 2007
There are some people that one does not want to see after highschool. One wishes to believe that after highschool, these sorts of people just cease to exist. One especially does not want to see them eating a double leg meal with rice-no-make-that-fries and an extra side of a dozen wings. Medium perri-perri.
Sigh.
I’m glad to have squeezed some Nando’s shifts into my break. I like working there a lot. It reminded me of the summer and how anxious I was to leave. How am I different now, three months later?
Any more mature? Any more skilled? Any more knowledgeable. Maybe.
Mostly I have felt that everything in Richmond has stood still. Everything is still in the same place, following its natural order.
Today at Nando’s, a baby grabbed my arm and looked at me knowingly. I think we were comrades in a past life.
It’s like fate December 15, 2007
The members of the tea collective are slowly trickling their way back into my life. Today I saw Mike at the bay randomly and Wednesday Katy showed up at my door. I can’t wait to see everyone. EXCITEMENT!!
Descended From a Long Line of Ancestors December 10, 2007
History does things to me. I thought, for so long, that it was art that was so intrinsically wound up in my intestines and that danced through my nervous system like an intervenous ivy.(Yes, I too caught the opportune wordplay.) But, like so many other assumptions I have made about myself, I am so desperately wrong. Of course, this is not entirely true; when it comes to history, Art is the bracket that hold up the shelf of volumes, of tomes where History is kept. But I thought that my love of Art was strictly philisophical and for the most part, an admiration of what I really wished I could do. But it wasn’t! I was looking into Time, my dearest and most understandingest-of-my-philosophical-ranting friends! Of late, I have been comprising a congeries of information, mainly logophilic, about stuff. Some of it is fascinating, most overwhelmingly difficult to consume. I’ve been looking at symbols and their meanings, nomenclature of the architecture of Cathedrals, jargon pertaining to film, the History of Paris and classical architectural drawings. The regement of hairs on my neck just started to march.
I’m coming to you, live from Vancouver Public Library, where I am so very enticed by the pigeons sitting and flapping and discharging on the windowsill beside my desk. (I finally got one of the good ones!) Here, in the library, I feel like I’m free to sit in this incredible building until the end of time and just fill my skull with pages and pages of small, black type. But before I return to my reading, I wanted to rant a tad and tell you all that I have found an awe-ing word that may perhaps be a sound replacement icnase ‘collective’ ever goes out of style. I was thinking perhaps, ‘Coterie.’ Not only is it a really fun word, but it has a pertinent definition,—a group of people who associate closely— and some very unfortunate ones; it also is the word used to describe a family or community of prarie dogs occupying a communal burrow. (Although…)
You can’t always get what you need. December 10, 2007
I never consented to being mindfucked into this severe a state. I only have five days left in this hell of a snowy wonderland, and I have never before in my life wanted more to cease to be! At least three institutions clearly want me that way, based on the cascading misfortunes of SATURDAY. Let me narrate, in a wrathful caffeine-jolt sorta Daniella way.
Clearly, UBC wants me dead.
Friday night, I bought myself dinner and Saturday morning, I bought myself breakfast. The common denominator was that they sucked and the difference was that on Saturday, my meal account had been suspended. Why? I cannot fathom any reason why I would not be permitted to eat. Did I not pay a fine? I haven’t been fined… and even then, HARSH! And, I can’t call the shitheap housing office because they are too good to work on the weekends and their weekday office hours seem to be from 1:00 to 1:00:09, which is clever because nobody is going to look forward to dealing with me Monday afternoon at 1pm ON THE NOSE. Because my voice will be raised and I may be wielding a sharp object.
You don’t need any special skillz to deduce that starvation due to arbitrary account-freezing is a passive-aggresive attempt at skidaddling me into the local morgue because I am no longer draining my funds on my meagre existence HERE. Fine. I’ll just get free meals at work and 10% off at that sushi place in the mall run by the awesome guy who knows my name and my love for sunomono salad. Because, you know, awesome fresh sushi takes the upper hand to deep fried jail food.
Clearly, The Ministry of Education wants me dead.
Douglas wants my transcript, which I think is a reasonable request on their part. What I do, is I send out for one and because I don’t have a credit card or a chequebook OR A FREAKING BANK OUTSIDE OF VANCOUVER, I send the fee in cash. My parents could have done it, I guess, but I’m so positive that if I asked my dad to find my student number and the form to fill out… oh, I expect too much. I send it out on November 16, which is three and a half weeks before the transcript deadline. December 2 is when it gets to Victoria and December 3rd is when the transcript is in the mail and three to five working days would make the deadline three to five days late (they don’t tell me this until it’s already past the deadline and already past office hours so no phoning and rectifying can be done until monday and now I get to worry about that all weekend, yayz). WHY? AND WHY CAN’T IT BE DONE ONLINE? Because, my friends, because the Ministry wants me to idle away my money and void me of any chance for a career and, thereby, cease to be.
Who else wants me dead? Douglas College. Though, I think they’ll settle for Vegetative State.
So, if you know anyone who needs a liver…
But seriously. After I got word that my transcript was being delayed (out… of… hatred….!), I called Douglas to see if I could get the deadline extended to the Friday. And, of course, this happened about thirty seconds after I was inexplicably denied food. Apparently, the housing office called to say I would need a favour and they condensed their office hours in a similar fashion. Since they aren`t open on the weekend… you see my dilemmo.
So I emailled them, and I haven`t heard back. I`ve also emailled my parents, and they haven`t contacted me in any way and I am supposed to be rescued on Friday.
Send help. Or non-perishables. I`ll be in the corner in a tinfoil hat, withering into the nethers.
Amalgam December 6, 2007
Sorry about making this so long. And so very subtly whiny.
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Blessings to the Blessay
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I love old people. They are often either overtly jovial, or delightfully glum, but either way are oftentimes a hoot. I find time and again that I enjoy the company of the older folk in the midst of the younger. On our tour of Morocco, and I think I can say the same for Daniella, my two favorite people were the couple of retired traveling Australians. They were so refreshing in the midst of all of those jaded twenty-and-thirty-somethings that I just couldn’t help but spend all of my excess time talking to them about Australia and places they’ve been. It also helped that they knew everything and were older people of the jovial sort.
But sometimes, there comes along a senior who has developed a quality or two that act as… well, something like a nail being tapped slowly into my Medulla Oblongata. As you may well have guessed, I am presently going to present you with an apt example of such a person, and do so with all manner of wit, pun and rhetoric. Unless I am tired (which is becoming rather commonplace, I must say) in which case, it will just be the wit for now.
There is a woman in my biology class who fits just this description. Surprise. Her name is Rose and she DEFINITELY has children. I know this because she has mentioned them in an attemptedly offhand sort of way in every conversation she has had anywhere in the world at any time. Not one class has gone by that she has not mentioned her children. The worst part is that her stories are always anecdotal and completely distracting from the topic, or even the subject being studied, for that matter. (Though, and I think this may actually be the worst part, her stories are always oddly extremely pertinent to whatever our teacher may be talking about at the time, so much so, that they are obviously lies, and clearly only serve the purpose of making it look like she has experienced everything there is to experience on the planet and is thusly some sort of sage.)
She has an opinion about everything, and though she knows how to talk, she has no idea as to the point of talking to people in conversation. The idea of someone other than herself contributing to a conversation is absurd. She’ll talk seamlessly for 5 minutes, unfailingly about her children, and you could be sitting there the entire time breathing out the beginning of a sentence and she’ll just get louder. Because clearly her story about how one time the sea-level was high by her house and the waves came in and blew the manhole cover off of its hole is far more important than the actual facts about why the sea-level is so high. And her children were going down inner tubes on the street-river. Wow, Rose, what a wondrous, mystical story.
The mass of her problems lies in her premature senescencism; she retains the do-goodiness of a 6th grade girl, and has the fashion sense of a guppy teacher, and yet has jumped the gun on her right to reference her children with every waking breath. That right is reserved for wonderful old ladies with tiny beige purses and suede gloves. She thinks that, in her age, she has acquired a mass of knowledge far beyond our (the younger students’) own. I am far more intelligent than this woman. I can say this with a steady hand. She is an imbecile. She tries to impart some sort of wisdom upon us with every utterance, each pearl wrapped up in a story about her own life, her church, her pets, her kids, her body, her house, her husband, her religion, yadda yadda yadda. And they are always the maxim. The way she runs her house is the pinnacle of saintlihood. As is the shape of her (horrifically wide) hips. With every one of her dull, self-interested yarns she irritates the class just a little more; with every one of her fables, we all look at each other and sigh. Add one to the ‘children mentioned’ scoreboard.
But life continues, as it always has, in Starbucks.
Here’s a fun Starbucks story. I went to said realm of legal near-narcotic experiences on Friday in the hopes of getting away from the two places that had endocytosized my life for months, namely Langara and my house. I hadn’t been writing as much as I had wanted to and, although I despise the Rowlingèsque cliché, my writing seemed to take on a fluidic nature when executed at Starbucks.
I settled down my bag and took off my scarf, it being, of course, the perfect temperature in there. I ordered up a chai latte (in a mug) and jubilated. Whilst awaiting my drink, a tall kid with either a major hunchback or a minor spina bifida hunched his way over to me, taking a painful long time, and asked me, with a splendid amount of forlorn, “Do you like local hip-hop?” The entire time I was adjusting to the discomfort that the question’s presence had brought around with it, he was staring me down. Harshly. I murmured, ere turning away that that wasn’t really my scene. In retrospect, I was wearing a rather smug, patronizing smile, which I regret doing. I may have been high from the chai.
As I sat down, I realized that he was hunching around to every patron of the bustling branch and asking them the exact same question. They were all turning him down. It came as no surprise then that in returning to my table he said quite offensively, “you know, you can listen to it before you buy it!” I, again, quite regretfully, replied, “I don’t buy hip-hop.” He sauntered off. Hunchedly.
But that was not the last encounter I would have with these strange stranger-encounters.
A man in a pea jacket over an impeccably tailored navy and white pinstripe suit with an air of good education and a haughty grace came up to me and asked me about my computer. The question wasn’t phrased in such a manner that it was invasive in any way to my privacy. It didn’t seem over-confident or aggressive, but was somewhat offhand and, well, quaintly posed. I responded, to my own surprise, with devout confidence and a tinge of amusement. This was an interesting person. I, on the other hand, was probably not the most interesting person in there; a college student with a silver PowerMac, a scarf and a cellphone in Starbucks. That depresses me.
The conversation went from computers to internet browsers to Google and its treachery. The man was a veritable well of interesting topics and, consequently, exceedingly interesting segues. After talking about Google and how they say in their privacy agreement that they can retain certain pieces of your information when you use the site until 2051, he said something about the French Parliament, or somesuch; he made a comparison to a specific man, and quoted him saying, “get any 40 of these men to write ten words down and I’ll convict them.” This was such an exciting addition to the already riveting conversation because the man knew exactly how many members of the parliament there were, the guy’s name and quoted him so nonchalantly.
Sufficed to say, it was a great visit, though was slightly diminished by the ditching of myself performed by Brendon on said day. But, I made it through. Also, it’s no big deal; no need to cry yourself to sleep over it, like me.
Then the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in 3-D rolled up beside me in a wheel-chair.
Why am I so akward? December 4, 2007
So on Sunday afternoon I get an email from my cousin sister in Toronto that one of our uncles has passed away. I’m still worried about what you guys will think about me spilling out junk about family crap like this… but I think – hope, know, wtv – that you’re the only ones right now to whom I can show the bones in my closet (and PLEASE suggest a line I can use to replace that cliche).
Anyways. Background info on my dad’s side of the family is as follows:
My dad has 3 brothers and a sister. They are somewhat kind of close… not really. His oldest brother died 10 years ago but has a son (Paul) who’s like 20 something and lives either in North/East/West Van. I meet him at family dinners but we never talk. He gave me his email address before I left home but I never emailed him because it just felt so akward.
His second brother in Toronto (the one who died) got divorced so his two sons (Will and Brian) live with his ex-wife. Hence, I’ve never talked to them either. I’ve had one of them on my msn list for years now, but again, it felt too akward talking to each other so we just didn’t.
His third brother in Toronto has two daughters. One (Jess) is a year older than me but she’s a quadreplegic and the the younger one (Naomi), I found out only recently is in grade 9. I’m sorry for her because she’s the baby in our family and deserves to be spoiled by all of us older cousins… but she isn’t. She’s growing up so nicely though… she’s the one who told me the news about my uncle and I try talk to her every now and then but it still feels akward talking to her too.
Last night I get a message from Will (for the first time.. well… ever) asking if I’m gonna be up in Toronto for the funeral. I can’t. Then he starts talking about how his dad’s death is hitting him and he really wants to get to know all of us better. He asked me about Paul, Jess, and Naomi and I realized that I knew jackshit about them. It’s not like our parents never wanted us to get to know each other… it was like a mix of our own fears and laziness that we just never stood up to break the akwardness. I gave him Paul’s email to talk together… since Paul went through what he did 10 years ago already. Will and I promised to keep in touch and meet up sometime. I got up the guts to send Paul an email for once. And you guessed it, the email was mega akward.
I feel sick. Like I’m taking advantage of my uncle’s death to rediscover my cousins. Why does it have to be this way? Why am I finding this all so hard? I’m their cousin for fuck’s sake and I’m scared of them. I’m worried that the conversation with Will is gonna be a one time thing. I’m scared that Paul’s gonna let me down by not replying to my email. I’m sad that Naomi’s not getting all the attention from us that she deserves. I’m frustrated that there’s nothing I can do to help Jess in any way shape or form. And I’m pissed that I still have no idea who the hell Brian is.
Yet I’m glad. And excited. That finally, after 18 years of this static ignorance towards my dad’s side of the family… it feels like something is starting to unravel. I just don’t know whether it’s for better or for worse. Plus I’m confused why I’m not as sad as I should be about my uncle’s death. I barely knew him but he was a cool guy. It’s just that my excitedness over finding other Chuns is way stronger… could this be what he wanted? Or am I just trying to make myself feel better… I don’t know. I should really be studying for finals… hah. Yeah… right.
Yuck.
A Quickee. December 2, 2007
My Grandma is so the best one that could possibly exist. She is spunky, smart and nicer than Santa Claus. But there is one thing about her I really don’t want to inherit and that is her immediate revolt of anything that, even for a second, goes against her status quo of ethics, (which, to tell you the truth, I would choose even after her insomnia. Which, incidentaly, I got.) I wonder, “how can she appreciate any art? At all?” But then I think, “what does it matter, we have tea.” My grandmother and I have cultivated a very special liking for tea culture. [!] I love her despite this little pitfall. Much like my relationship with you guys. [Laugh.]
