I’ve been holed up in my apartment for days (read: academic imprisonment), and today I have a day pass to do a KAZILLION things, only to find that the outside world is a circus. I’ll get into it later, when I break free of Orkut jail and academic prison. Wish me luck. Send me a nail file.
March, 2004
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The Outside World is a Circus
March 31, 2004 by Gail
Posted in Student Life | No Comments
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Danger Mouse
March 30, 2004 by Gail
In the TV cartoons from our childhood community on Orkut, someone posted the link to the Danger Mouse theme music:
Bless him!
Posted in Pop Culture | 1 Comment
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I’d Never Make a Living as a Writer
March 29, 2004 by Gail
I’d starve. My editor would HATE me.
OK, enough fooling around. Write!
Either:
a) I’m an OK writer who could be better not with instruction, but a cattle prod
b) I’m a decent writer who is held back by an inability to write without extreme pressure or threat to life and limb
c) I’m a terrible writer with flashes of mediocrity—->delusions of grandeur in irregular cycles
d) I’m sick and tired of school and need a holiday.I’ll take d), because that’s the only one I know for sure. I have a theory for why, for the first time in 2.5 years, I am only taking one SFU course but feel less energized than other terms when I have three on the go at the same time: I didn’t go anywhere at Christmas break. I always go on a trip somewhere to re-set my brain, and in December I stayed put… well, you all know why.
*NEWSFLASH*! There is a God. I’m going to have a live-in chef. An Aussie houseboy. (ha ha — just kidding, Matt)
Matt’s coming back to Vancouver. He’ll be staying in my apartment part of the time I’ll be in Europe, and for about 10 days after I return and before he returns to Australia, he will be at my beck and call… I’m telling you, he promised me laksa way back in December, and he has the nerve to be “flat out livin’ the dream”, he says, riding his snowboard all day in Whistler and working all night… first that Aussie bloke Steve hitches all the way up to Alaska with my apartment keys in his pocket, now this Matt guy takes four months (it’ll be five once he actually does it) to make good on his promise of laksa. What’s with these Aussie guys, anyway??? I’ll see Steve in a few weeks in London, but he’s probably breathing a sigh of relief that this time I won’t be making any toxic homemade sangria that renders one unconsconscious after an hour…
Posted in Student Life | 1 Comment
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Crimes of Fashion
March 28, 2004 by Gail
You think people should be jailed for Crimes of Passion? How about Crimes of Fashion.
I posted this all over Orkut, in the Fashion Police forums, in the Vancouver community, wherever I could.
Spotted today. I had my camera with me, so I took a picture. The little old Chinese lady is wearing a SUPER-HOT-PINK velour tracksuit, and a matching fuschia and black spotted bag, with brown leather shoes, a brown leather coat, and a fuschia and white hat (the fuschia in the hat is also very bright), with big sunglasses. I suppose she’s matched the fuschia, but with the brown it’s painful to look at. She sat down right away, and she’s behind plexiglass, so you don’t get the full effect of full-body fuschia pink next to brown leather.
I saw lots of scary fashion today, but this was the only person who was stationary, and I could take a photo at a distance.
[ADDENDUM March 28: Anyone who takes this post seriously either hasn't read the two-drink disclaimer or is not familiar with the word facetious or my attitude toward the colour pink.]
Posted in Photography | 6 Comments
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Nellie McKay
March 26, 2004 by Gail
This girl is hilarious… check her out:
MSN Entertainment – Music: Nellie McKay
I read about her a while back, but hadn’t gone searching for a listen until I read Darren Barefoot’s blog. Her debut is a double album titled “Get Away From Me”!
I find it very hard to believe she’s 19, but you know, there are stranger things in this world.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
March 24, 2004 by Gail
Saw this film last night with Eliza and it was great!
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Lacuna Inc.
The first time I saw this title, I knew I wanted to see it. (I have a very spotty mind, see.) There was something very tantalizing about the premise:From Yahoo Movies:
From the twisted mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (‘Adaptation,’ ‘Being John Malkovich’). ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ features Jim Carrey as a man who undergoes a process to remove all memories of his ex-girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet. The film also stars Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood.
This film is for anyone who’s ever been in a relationship consisting of two very different personalities trying to make a go of it. I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but speaking as a self-admitted sentimental old fool, a memory junkie who organizes her photo albums not by chronology but by subject, who takes her camera around with her everywhere, and keeps boxes of journals and little scraps of paper with notes in friends’ handwriting for so long the paper has yellowed, this movie validates my otherwise unpractical behaviour of hoarding my memories. What are we but a walking microprocessor with a massive memory cache? OK, don’t answer that. But, biology aside, aren’t we very much shaped by our experiences?
I have an above-average memory. It’s not quite as good as it used to be — I never used to write much down, I memorized all the phone numbers I used often, and I had a pretty good recall for addresses, too. These days I have the stuff I use regularly stored in memory, like driver’s license, SIN, credit card numbers and expiry dates, Aeroplan number, that kind of thing. I wouldn’t care if someone erased those — as long as I can still read, I can read those numbers off slips of paper. But quite often I can’t recall certain details, trivial stuff I used to rattle off easily, and it bugs me. It’s as if the memory cache is filling up, and something’s got to be erased before I can store more. Now here I am, blogging stories and posting photos, putting my thoughts out for all to see… if one day I had Alzheimer’s, would I read this blog and have some kind of cognitive spark? Or will the undocumented memories be lost forever?
It occurred to me one day, after someone commented on my memory (usually prefaced by “I have such a crappy memory”), that part of me doesn’t believe that a having a good memory is a gift at all. I feel that my memory is as it is because I feel it’s important. Just like other things that we feel are important, like keeping a tidy house, or exercising, we engage in these activities not out of discipline but a deep-seated regard for its value to ourselves. So, I make a point of remembering things of no material consequence, such as whether a person likes a particular Jamaican rum, because it makes that person much more real to me — in my mind. They’re not just a walking microprocessor wrapped in biology, as I said before, they’re a flesh-and-blood unique creature with a predilection for Appleton rather than Captain Morgan. Sounds like a paperweight example, but when you think of 5 billion or so people on this planet, and no two people born the same, it’s these little details that begin to distinguish people apart from physical characteristics… in addition to their tastes for spirits, there are preferences for food, fashion, structures, climate, cars, and even each other’s company. (My little segue back to the film, you could see that coming.)
The two characters in the film are so different, and I can relate to that. Or, maybe I dated someone so like me I had to break up with him because of a hidden self-loathing… Ha! — I think not, he was really just a pompous bastard… anyway… I won’t say too much more, other than mention a hilarious but apt reference to the “dining dead” — couples having dinner and being so bored with each other that they just focus on their food — and a line from the film that had me laughing: “Just because you talk constantly doesn’t mean you’re communicating,” says Joel.
Posted in Reel + Screen, Videoclips | 1 Comment
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Anti-war Demonstration and Crescent Beach
March 22, 2004 by Gail
On Saturday, after sleeping the sleep of the dead, I woke up to crowds building on Beach Avenue. I had no idea what for, but I was pretty out of it: the night before, after speeding to the ferry after a long day at work and nearly getting a ticket, I went to the airport and Allison’s plane was delayed out of Chicago for something like an hour. I nearly fell asleep leaning again a railing. Allison herself had been up nearly 24 hours, so we were a right pair driving to Surrey. I confessed to her that I’d never driven to Surrey from the airport before, so I just had to make sure I took the right exit… I did not… I shot past the Surrey exit and we ended up in White Rock, then I took the 99 north again, missed another exit, so I ended up taking us to Surrey along the 17, the trucking road beside the Fraser River. Crazy! I returned the car after 2am.
So, yes, it was the sleep of the dead on Friday night. On Saturday morning I looked out the window and watched as people streamed onto the beach, and figured out by a sign or two what was going on. I cooked my omelette and listened to D.O.A. screaming some garbled anti-war phrase. Surreal. Then I heard someone mention that Noam Chomsky would be on later. Noam Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky Talking on My Beach?
Apparently so, but I had to head out on the Skytrain, so Allan and I could take the kiddies to Crescent Beach. On the bus I could hear people talking about Noam Chomsky, and I kick myself a bit now that I didn’t hang around long enough to see him speak. After all, the man is now 75 years old, and not only was this speaking engagement a public, free event, but it was across the bloody street!
Anyway…
We took the kidlets to Crescent Beach and had a good time playing teeter-totter, making stick cities, and building pretend campfires. It’s good to get the kids out of the House of Chaos.
Me with baby Megan. This is the bigger twin. I got to hold both babies the Sunday before, for the first time. They’re still pretty tiny, and everyone’s still making the necessary adjustments to having them home. It’s been a while since there were newborns in the house, now that Maddy is two and a half. I like the fact that the older 3Ms are talking and rounding out their personalities. They’re much more interesting now that they have broader vocabulary!
Melissa, for one, is very verbose. She talks almost incessantly, but quality phrases, rich with hedging, proper grammatical usage of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, independent and dependent clauses, and all sorts of rather scarily large words for a 4-year old. Cheryl told me that she heard Melissa preface her sentence with, “Incidentally, …” ??
Michael isn’t quite there yet, but his penchant for proper nouns rather than generic terms are hilarious (eg., burmese python, which someone had Googled and ended up here). The boy of 3 has an excellent memory for songs, too. I remember this even when he was barely old enough to form the words, let alone memorize them.
Maddy is talking a lot now, too, and her words are becoming progressively clearer. Before, she needed a translator — either Cheryl or Allan. She still does a lot of repetition and uses generic words, but last year we were wondering why she didn’t seem to care much about talking. Probably because Melissa wouldn’t let her get a word in edgewise.
Posted in Family, Politics + Economy | 1 Comment
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I’m Surrounded by the Absurd
March 22, 2004 by Gail
I was out late on Thursday night. I’m talking really late.
So, on Friday morning, when I drove on the ferry, I did a double-take when I saw what was on the car ahead of me. What the hell???
DIP ME IN HONEY AND THROW ME TO THE LESBIANS?
The vehicle was a ute — as they call them in Australia, short for utility vehicles. Half car, half truck. Inexplicably, there were tons of these utes around when I was in Australia. I thought they died along with the 70s, but Australia has a tendency to time warp… a post for another day…
Anyway, the driver of this vehicle wore a baseball cap and sunglasses and a sort of BC hick outfit of lumberjack shirt over a t-shirt — hey, it’s morning, so I could’ve been seeing things. I took a photo of this vehicle just to make sure it wasn’t my fuzzy imagination.
Close Call
I was late leaving the office on Friday, and was panicking that I wouldn’t make the last ferry. I had to be on that ferry, not just to return the Volkswagen co-op Beetle, but because Allison’s flight was due in at 10:21pm. (Allison is my sister-in-law’s sister.) If I missed the ferry, I would’ve had to:
1) get Allan to pick up Allison
2) pay hefty fines for not returning the car on time (I had it until 3am, and someone booked it at 6am)
3) overnight on the Sunshine Coast at somebody’s house
So, I kept my fingers crossed and sped like a bat out of hell down the Sunshine Coast Highway. I raced down the long hill that leads to the ferry terminal and what do you know — there’s an RCMP OFFICER waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, waving me over.I was so mad! What is a police officer doing at the bottom of a 2km hill in front of the terminal booth just before the last ferry off the Sunshine Coast?? That is so DIRTY! That’s like shooting fish in a barrel! If I missed that ferry (the cars were disembarking), I would’ve, I would’ve… I was so mad I couldn’t think of anything! It’s like my mind went purple.
Instead, I pulled over and rolled down the window.
Officer: “You realize that your excessive speed calls for a $368 fine, plus demerits on your license, and… blah blah blah”
Me, trying to keep calm, just looked him straight in the eye and without emotion said evenly and slowly: “I HAVE TO MAKE THIS FERRY”
Officer, without missing a beat: “You should’ve left earlier, then.”Standoff. I said nothing. There was a long pause. At that point, I would’ve paid the $368 on the spot to get the whole thing hurried up so I could actually make it to the booth. Because if he was actually going to charge me, I was still going to try to make that ferry!
After a pause that lasted an eternity, he let me go, and with a big sigh of relief, I drove to the booth to find out what lane to go down.
Bloody hell.
Posted in Rants, Tales of the Absurd | No Comments
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The Growing Edwin Clan
March 21, 2004 by Gail
This is the first attempt at a photo shoot with all 7 of them together, and even though we shot lots of photos, this is about as good as it gets.
Allan is holding Michael and Madeleine, Melissa is squished in between Allan and Cheryl, and the baby to the left in the pic is — I’m pretty sure — Maribeth, and Megan is on the right.
Posted in Family, The Ms | No Comments
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Dinner in the Dark
March 18, 2004 by Gail
When my friend Karen sent this invitation off to me, I couldn’t resist. A mystery dinner with a bunch of strangers in pitch darkness? I’m in!
I met up with Karen outside of DV8. The place was completely taped up so you couldn’t see inside. It was positively cave-like. The last time I can recall sharing an experience in darkness with strangers was “blackwater rafting” in New Zealand. It was towards the south end of the North Island, with a Maori outfit that sent you off along a small river through a cave system in an inner tube. The amazing part of it was the presence of glow worms. No, not those silly green toys from the ’80s, these were the Real McCoy.
They hung from the ceiling just like this, and believe me — there is nothing quite like the experience of floating in the darkness, looking up at points of light above your head, knowing that the light is emitted from… hanging worms. If you’re squeamish or claustrophobic in any way, I don’t recommend blackwater rafting. You’re in a cave, after all, the walls are slimy (if you can even find them), and often you have to crawl through small areas. We were given spelunking hats with lights, but we turned them off when we were in the tubes and floating. Voices reverberated everywhere, and you never really knew how far away people were. At one point we were told to turn off our lights to go down a drop — a height of which we had no idea. You could hear the water rushing over the edge, but you couldn’t see it, and even though we knew it couldn’t be very high, just not knowing was nerve-wracking for some.
Dinner in the Dark wasn’t quite like that. I suppose the only thing you could be scared of was embarrassing yourself or getting groped. Thankfully, I did neither, but anticipating possible embarrassment, I wore black so if I’d spilled food on myself, it wouldn’t be so noticeable, I made sure my wine glass was as far away from the others as possible, and I turned to the guy to my left to ask if he was right or left-handed. I told him I was right-handed, so we wouldn’t have:
a) a glass crash
b) a hand crash
c) bits of flying food–oh, did I mention there were no eating utensils? It was a mystery dinner: all kinds of food put on your plate, and you could only feel your way around.
The event organizers explained they were going to have assigned seating, and if we wanted to sit with the people we came with, we’d have to grab their arm. “Don’t go looking around for attractive people to hook arms with,” they said, “it’s not going to matter.”
That’s part of why this dinner intrigued me — the idea that conversational skills were more important than how you looked. You could be the most stunning-looking person ever, but if you couldn’t carrying on a conversation, all you could do was play with your mystery food and imagine what the other people looked like. I was the first person to be placed in one of the four-person booths on one side of DV8. Most of the people were placed along a row of long tables, which meant you’d be flanked with people. Since I was first in the booth, I had the wall to my right and someone to my left. Then two people were seated across from us. Thankfully, everyone was chatty, although I’d saw the guy next to me, Greg, and I were probably were the more talkative out of the four of us. This is what information emerged from our table:
Jen, 22 (?), Spanish student in Colorado Briggs, 20 (?), poli-sci student near Tacoma, WA Greg, 26, journalist with Westender me, old fogey at our table Jen and Briggs are brother and sister from Roswell, New Mexico… I know what you’re thinking — we talked about UFOs, right? Well, how could we not? This was their first time in Canada, and they’d come up for a couple of days to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Greg was at the Dinner not by design — his boss at the Westender gave him a ticket.
Dinner in the Dark is supposed to give your non-visual senses a nudge. It certainly does — one thing I noticed almost immediately is that there is a distinct BC accent. Greg’s got it, and he says he’s BC born and raised. Describing an accent is like describing a colour, but all I can say is you can definitely identify it. The easiest way to recognize it is that Greg sounds JUST LIKE other BC guys I know — for example, Mike, my former BCIT classmate and now my ‘cousin-law’. Canadian regional accents — bar the Newfies — are not as distinct as they are in other parts of the world, but Greg says when he’s in Toronto people know he’s from BC.
[Update, March 26: Greg's story in the Westender, March 25 -- "Dinner in the Dark Sheds Light on New Way to Socialize")
All four of us guessed at what we were eating, but some of it was still a mystery until the lights came up at the end. We listened to a play (how funny does that sound?) by a local group called Rock, Paper, Scissors — yes, still in the dark — but all I could think of was, I have to go to the bathroom! Do I get out my little Swiss army knife with flashlight, push Greg out of the booth, and make a ruckus? What to do! What to do! After a few minutes I was really starting to regret not making a dash for it before the play started, but we were all so busy yakking it hadn’t occurred to me. I was so distracted from the play, my thoughts were so wrapped up in my bathroom strategies:
Should I just go for it now, before the play ends and other people try to run in the dark to the bathroom and we all collide in a heap?
Which door was the bathroom, anyway? What if I end up in the men’s and someone’s in there?
Is the video camera person filming the play in the dark standing between me and the bathroom? (Now and then we’d see a tiny red recording light, and that was the only way we’d know someone was filming us in the dark… spooky)
Would I disturb everybody with my tiny flashlight on?When the play was over, I made a mad dash. Luckily, we were closer than most of the people, and I’m familiar enough with the layout of DV8 to know generally where to go. The lights finally came on shortly after, and the first we did was look at each other… of course! Suddenly I recognized Jen, because earlier in the evening she almost fell down near the bottom of the stairs, and somebody caught her. I took one look at her Superman t-shirt, and very nearly made a joke, like “Hey, you’re supposed to be Superman…” In retrospect, I’m glad I kept my trap shut, even though wearing a Superman t-shirt is asking for jokes. Briggs, her younger brother, didn’t really look like Jen, he reminded me of Jared Leto, then later I thought he looked more like Robbie Williams. I really had no idea what either of them looked like when we were having dinner, and the same went for Greg. It’s funny how you can be drawn to people by their voices, and I have to say I was a bit curious to see what Greg looked like once I listened to him for the duration of a meal. Karen came over to tell me she’d ripped her contact lens and had to go home toute suite, Greg parted ways with us, and Jen and Briggs and I went to the Nelson Cafe for more drinks. I gave them some tips on free parking and plotted some places to check out St. Patty’s Day on Jen’s map. We shot the breeze at the Nelson Cafe until nearly midnight before they decided to head back to their sketchy hostel on Main St.
As I walked home, I thought about how much we take our senses for granted. In Edinburgh I lived with a bunch of flatmates, and one of them was deaf. Martin was Irish, and deaf from birth. If you are familiar with the Irish, this sounds like a set up for a joke. To say that the Irish love to talk is an overwhelming understatement. I’m reading Frank McCourt’s second book ‘Tis, and it reminds me of every Irish person I’ve ever known… the gift of the gab. I lived with two Irish brothers in Sydney, Australia, and I could never tell when they were pulling my leg, they were so convincing and persuasive. I’ve had Irish employers, co-workers, friends, and trips to the Emerald Isle, and it seems they’re all like that.
Martin was deaf, but he was mute, and we communicated with his teletype machine. I’m pretty fast on keyboard, so we would have long, drawn out conversations about anything. Nobody else in the flat talked to him as much as I did, which actually caused some tension when Martin showed me favour and disdain for the others, for ignoring him. When they asked him for anything, he’d turn them down. As Gillian succinctly put it, “Martin thinks the sun shines out of your arse.” Sometimes they would try — when Martin was around and in other times, too, we’d mute the TV and turn on the teletext just to remind ourselves that we had to adjust our ways and be more understanding. Some situations pissed people off — for example, if someone got locked out and Martin was the only one at home, they could bang on the door until they were blue in the face and Martin would have no idea. We were all renting, so it’s not as if the owner was going to change the doorbell to one that flashed the lights, or the kinds of things you might find in a deaf person’s home.
Martin didn’t stay at the flat for very long, and part of that was because two of the five of us pissed him off too much. I mean, Martin was a regular guy who went dancing (there’s plenty of vibration to get the rhythm, he said), was bi-lingual since he had sign language as well (I wonder if they have Irish brogue in the signing, too?), and didn’t deserve to be ignored. Deaf people can lip-read pretty well, and it’s up to us speaking people to cut them some slack and slow down a bit. Martin was the only deaf guy I’ve ever lived with, but it was an ear-opener — in the same way that Dinner in the Dark was an eye-opener. We have five senses (some might argue six), and we need to use them ALL, as much as possible. Just like the old saying goes, you don’t miss something until it’s gone.
Posted in Out + About, Raconteurism | No Comments
