Missed Connections

Me: Wavy, bordering on loose curls. I've grown a bit wild, and I know it. I need someone to rein me in, but I want to keep some of my trademark length and volume. Spring is here and I want to move in the wind.

You: Sassy mid-fourties hair dresser. You won't let anything keep you down. Not the fact that your veiny muffin top extrudes over your jeans and under your favorite shirt from six years ago, or the fact that as you near menopause you're hairdressing as a 'junior' at a reduced fee. You're vocal with your concern to cut hair "in fashion"

Will we be a perfect match? Will you make me flower anew in a style-Springtime all my own?




FUCK!

Disapointment

I dropped off an order the other day for a catering event. I hauled several litres of coffee up a small flight of stairs in an auditorium while the man who organized the event watched me expectantly. Coffee for one hundred and fifty people probably weighs about sixty to sixty-five pounds. Cans of ‘Dole’ brand juice weighs perhaps a bit more. He waited until I had the juice almost up the stairs to speak up.

“Oh we don’t want the juice. Dole has a terrible human rights record.”

How does one respond to that? I went with, “Oh...”

He said something in French. The only word I picked out was ‘slavery’, which is great, because the free canned ‘Dole’ brand juice at my job is in the top three good things about working there. In a shift I can be counted on to drink seven of them (order: Orange [for breakfast], Pineapple-Mango, Pineapple-Mango, Pineapple-Mango, Strawberry-Kiwi, Pineapple-Mango, Pineapple-Mango). Poisoned as I am by apathy and a left wing education institution, I won’t stop drinking them, but I will feel a small pang for whoever it is ‘Dole’ brand is enslaving to bring me such a delicious blend of pineapple and mango. And hey, maybe they get free juice.

The number of black and white issues on which I have been able to make a stand are few and steadily decreasing. They are things like authenticity, human rights and pickles. I loath pickles. They are awful. Period. Full stop. -> . <- Making sandwiches today, Brittney pulled out a jar of the things. I made the requisite disparaging comments.

“No,” she said. “These are ‘bread and butter’ pickles. You just hate dill.”

This was categorically false but I was feeling calm and fair minded so I gave them a try. She passed me a quarter of a slice and I knew I was in trouble because it didn’t smell revolting. It tasted alright and I admitted as much and I admitted another shade of gray into my life. I am too defeated even to say that I did it grudgingly. The worst of it is that I can look good in either black or white, but gray is the universal colour of I wanted to stay home. That’s why picket lines are always so fashionable.

None of this would be nearly so debasing if I was Bruce Lee. He was handsome. But I’m not him yet.

Energy Conversion

On the 23rd of this month, I will complete my Undergraduate degree.

I had my first pang just two days ago.

I was hauling juice from one fridge to another fridge. (Catering is largely about moving things from one cold place to another and throwing away perfectly good muffins because your backpack is already full of muffins.) Nostalgia congealed inside of me. For me, nostalgia is centered between my breastbone and up to the bottom of my adam's apple. I thought of a paper that had tortured me, really pounded my head into the fridge. Nostalgia pushed against the very top of my rib cage.

Nostalgia said that I missed that paper.

Now I can understand the idea of really holding University up after a few years. The edges and bures have all been worn and the word is cool and smooth in your mouth like a pebble. (If anyone can't remember exactly what a pebble feels like in their mouth then they didn't lead a proper childhood). But not now. It isn't even over yet. I can still remember the fatigue, frustration, reproach, maddness et al.

S + I = A
A + t = Nos

S - Situation
I - Interpretation
A - Action
t - Time
Nos - Nostalgia

Oh. Now I get it.

Critical Thought Necessary

I was quite surprised just about fifteen minutes ago as I walked into my University to find a display in the front lobby of the library building. Now that there was a display wasn’t particularly surprising. It seems about once or twice a month we’ve got someone’s pictures up from their trip to Kenya or a god awful attempt at a career fair. No, this wasn’t the cheap poster board confection of your average budget-Concordia affair, but a full on mini-museum display. The walls erected have chain link fence and barbed wire painted over a mat black finish. Waiting at the entrance is a television (notable because flat screens are still well beyond Concordia’s budget) telling you of the evils of psychiatry.

It took me about three seconds of scanning the fine print on The Citizens Commission on Human Rights hand out to find where it says that they were “...founded by the Church of Scientology....” Nearly needless to say, the exhibit can be described as devoid of historical context, evidence or anything other than a single narrative used to weave an incredibly diverse array of subjects together at best (Hitler came to power for the same reason Curt Cobain committed suicide), or bat shit crazy at worst.

That’s not really the point though.

If you would like a much more in depth look at the exhibit, I believe what I found in school today was very close to what Andrew Gumbel describes in his story on the opening of the exhibit in Hollywood. Read that here

If you would like to know about why Scientology hates psychiatry, go here and read about body Thetans. They’re attached to you, you know, and only Scientology can help you get them off and rid you of their negative energies.

If you’d like a humorous explanation of Scientology, go here

What I’d like to do is thank the CCHR and Scientology. You see, I’m only a few days away from an Arts degree that has left me with nothing that really constitutes an actual skill set. All I have, all that I am at this point, is critical thought. This display has given me hope. It reminded me that some things are really retarded, and even though this particular retarded thing happens to be a well known retarded thing, there will be other, less blatant and better devised retarded things. And with five years of post-secondary education behind me, I just might be ready.

or not.

There are monsters

Growing up, when I wasn't at chess club (Wednesday lunch hour!), I was reading about monsters. When the other kids were doing reports on lions and gazelles, I was holding up pictures of plaster castes of what might be bigfoot's foot for the whole class to see. (If you are looking for a good young adult novel (fiction) about the Loch Ness monster let me recommend my favorite.
I don't want to ruin anything for you, but it turns out that the Loch Ness monster is actually good and it's the people who are bad. What a twist! I have read this book over a dozen times.)

Much like the plucky tween protagonist in 'Loch', I have continued to search for the unknown even though my parents tell me I'm a day dreamer and an extravagently rich man has repeatedly told me not to go 'snooping my nose' into his business, which happens to be the transportation of large exotic sea creatures.

That's why I am hardly shocked, (but very shocked) by the new species I discovered in my cupboard.
Despite specifically asking to be pointed towards the onions at the grocery store, I was apparently directed towards monster eggs. My saving grace was that they came pre-captured-in-a-net. Otherwise these would probably be digging around in my brain via my nose right now. I've done a bit of digging around myself, and I think I've located the babydaddy. You ARE the father!

Instead of destroying the things for the good of humanity, I've decided to try and nurture the little onions and become imprinted as their mother figure. I consider the eventual control for a trio of tentacle-faced demon spawn to be one of the soundest investments into my future I could hope to make, save of course for mutual funds.

At best second place

When I walked to school and saw a car cruising downtown Montreal's main drag with it's muffler hanging so low it scraped the street and left a trail of sparks, I thought I had a pretty solid story. It had everything: sparks (which is almost fire), a loud consistent noise and people unaware at the massive amounts of attention they are drawing to themselves.

Then I told Brittney.

Brittney grew up on a farm in Alberta: hours north of everything you hold dear and filled with the kind of stereotypes that would make a drunk rowdy Irishman sue me for defamation of character.

When I was done explaining what an awe inspiring sight I had beheld that day, Brittney nonchalantly riposted with a little gem about a semi truck. The anger you hear in the audio is a man whose believed himself to be at a great height, only to have the clouds part and realize that his own peak is no where near the top.

(I apologize for the scratchiness at some points. I suggest you turn your sound down a bit. Also for my terrible radio voice. Let's pretend I have a speach impediment.)