I heart john

I'd marry John Cusack just to to be friends with Joan.

I'd sleep with him because it would be interesting. Not good, but interesting.

Paranthetic Paragraphy

I could live in this paragraph.

Right now, please. Because the one I'm currently messed up with is collapsing. Why the hell did I accept a job as a writer? Really. I ask myself that ten times a day.

(I wonder if their coffee stand is called Paranthetic?)

Irregardless of how it is impacting our language

IMPACT is a noun — the striking of one body against another; collision.

IMPACTED is an adjective — wedged together at the broken ends; prohibiting eruption into a normal position like an impacted tooth.

IMPACTED is often mis-used as a verb — "to have an effect" — and frequently appears in the jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, officials, and analysts.

Though most word nerds disapprove of the use of impact as a transitive verb and the construction "to impact on", the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions, most assume it will eventually become unobjectionable.

"Irregardless" is not a word, regardless of its vernacular use. I shudder whenever I hear it.

messed up monkies

Sigh. I hate when somebody calls me on my whiny bullshit.

Stealth Birthday

Happy Birthday Oksana, my fabulously mysterious friend and GBS compatriot! I love you ms. hottie ninja.

Ephemeral kack

Fascinating. I just tripped into the "merchants of cool" interview, which was a wander off the path, a falling into the sea, and immediately fixated on the section of the interview that speaks the the causal and growing rift between adult and teen: "These days it's just because they [adults] don't have time [to understand the teen generation]. They're time poor. And it's intimidating".

It is scary — losing time, time slipping away, being time poor. I'm turning adult and I don't like it that much. My adult brain is too soaked up and wasted by the ephemeral kack called "working for a living". My attention span is shortening and my ability to think wildly open is closing.

Aldous Huxley is winning the dystopian bet. Life and living free, as constituted by logic, nation, and capitalism, and, yes, even socialism, is reduced to feed the machine we call real. A system's gross and/or control relies on this reality. But it's just one path we've carved deeper and deeper for centuries. It's a curious sphere that most people blissfully navigate in the grumpiest of ways. Why can't it be different? Better? And knowing more? Enlightening?

Why is doing it — life — another way not as real or valid? I am fascinated by the space between a living that is ethical and content, yet often monitarily poor, and a living where personality is reduced by a meted wage. It seems a no man's land.

I wish my state would cast me off to that island resting wildly outside of the Brave New World.

Dirty little group secrets

Remnant email from my time as a jaded-post-raver:
(I'm pretty sure I taught Sunday morning... at least, I think it was Sunday, who knows.)

Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2000 5:28 PM
Subject: weekend workshop: group interventions, dynamics & aspirations

We at Sensitive Group WorksTM invite you to a weekend workshop to make your group better, stronger, and more insular. We promise that after this workshop, nobody will understand your group, nor will your group understand anyone outside of it. Our service is guaranteed, and if you are not satisfied with the results, your group gets its money back!

After some intensive research on our part, we have devised a tentative schedule for your weekend, with your members contributing to help you highlight your strengths and mostly your weaknesses.

Reach out and learn from your own group!

Friday Evening: The Weekend Warm-Up — "All about it!" with Coco Chanel
Artificial enlightenment and its benefit for you and your group!

BYO yoga mats for everybody's new favorite pastime and leave your watch at home. Don't plan on sleeping, for this seminar may take you into the early hours of the morning.

Saturday Morning: The Morning After — "Totally wicked!' with Lorna Laush
Group cohesiveness and why you are important to your group!

Sick of attending all your group functions?
Let Lorna inspire you to always participate!

Saturday Afternoon: Total Group Domination — "What's your problem?" with Mah Belle
Monitoring your group and cultivating your mothering skills!

Are members of your group unwilling to follow the rules?
Helping the group understand why you are right!

Saturday Evening: Cerebral Saturday — "Yes please" with Steve & Gunter
Strengthening group-mind control with ESP

If you can't read the minds of your fellow group members, how can you possibly maintain a united front against outsiders? Learn the patented MindlinkTM from the real originators!

Sunday Morning: Consensus & Politics — "BoingBoing" with Violet Chrome & Lady Bird
Nurturing political correctness and the feminists within.

Coercion and trade-offs are replaced with creative alternatives, and compromise with synthesis. Get it? REALLY? Because we sure don't!

Sunday Afternoon: Sensitive & Caring Brunch — "For sure we're snobs!" with WA Holden, Jack Exass & Jorde Pante
Taking friend lessons, and the brotherhood of cleanliness.

Learn how to make oil and water mix into a zesty Creole, lard, vegan vinaigrette while keeping things clean, dammit (especially your cat's asshole).

We look forward to hearing from your group.
Just remember...
Nobody knows you, your dirty secrets, and your weaknesses better than your group!

Sexy Results

If my breasts could sing and eat cake like this orally fixated pair, I wonder what they'd say about this hypnotic and compelling video by the Gang of Four, mod-discotheque band Death From Above 1979?

Unfortunately my breasts only have nipples — one each — so alls I can do with my talking head is spit out this: the results of "Sexy Results" is not so vanilla sexy really, though it is a fantastic summary of post-post-feminism-cum-metrosexual-male, with a dash of gen y's easy breezy attitude toward media and the naked body thrown into the cultural mix.

Snack on Skullet

I'm devouring Ivan E. Coyote's collection of short stories Loose End like a celled don before a contraband plate of momma's famous spaghetti... I never could chew thirty times before I swallowed.

There are so many tasty tidbits in this book; I want to leave you with a long list of them. But I have decided to act ladylike for once and watch my table manners. So I leave you to macrobiotically masticate on this:

"...a couple of skinny Dungeons & Drangons-looking guys [were] sporting what I call a skullet, which is a guy who's hair is long at the back and gone on the top."

Vespa and Sears bastard child...

The Pa's a car buff, so is the Uncle. And in my lame attempt to talk "old cars" with the males in the family, I mentioned that a co-worker of mine owns a beautiful '63 Vespa Scooter, which is an elegant light grey with white detailing.

So the Uncle excitedly pipes up (but directs his response toward dear old dad), "Remember back in Saskatchewan? They sold Vespa scooters at Simpsons-Sears under the name 'Allstate'?"

Well, my comment failed to get me into the boy's club, but they did spark me with an excellent hipster item that just screams violet: a ghetto version of a vespa. Now that's sort of my ride, don't you think?

I want one. A Simpsons-Sears "Allstate Cruisaire" — that'd make for some heavy ICRS* points.

*Indie Credibility Rating System: those who are seen at the coolest live shows, have the freshest do, and mix with the right people; those who are eternally hunting cool points to flavour them hiper-than-thou, in this here illusion-of-the-moment lifestyle. I use ICRS with all the irony I can muster, but I still play the game... just with monopoly money.

Apocatropolis

I have always loved that fantasy in which some flesh dissolving agent, be it nuclear, chemical or biological, has removed all other people from the city, leaving me (and perhaps some River Phoenix-looking vigilante) alone to explore the reminants of a fragmented society. I used to imagine going into the Harbour Castle in Toronto (my aunt used to live there and it was the Ritziest place I'd ever come across) and searching through all those posh apartments for the necessities of life. Perhaps burning piles of LL Bean catalogues to keep warm. I was always worried about how long canned goods would last, but not to the point where I imagined myself as some Snowman type character, fighting off wild animals for years-old cocktail wienies.

{I was terminally shy in high school and would spend countless hours daydreaming of just such a fate. HEY! If you grew up in a cultural vacuum like I did, you would have done the same. The only street-cred I had in high school was being one of the only two kids within a 50km radius who had access to a satalite dish in the early 90's (read: MTV and HBO). Now ask me why I pine for Julie Brown ("J,J,J is for Julie, U,U,U I love U too-ou-ou, L,L,L love you oh so truly..." I could go on).}

Anyway, where was I going with this?? Oh yes, (I'll call this my Virginia Woolf stream-o-consciousness blog). So I recently stumbled across this website and it stirred up in me that long retired fantasy of being the only person alive in a vast concrete museum. Part of me wishes I had the nerve for urban exploration but the social conditioning has worked depressingly well on me. Sadly, I just don't have the chutzpah. My heart pounds and I get all squeaky until I just cave and gasp "Let's just get outta here". The closest I ever came was when myself and two friends after a show at a local hotel, and after many buckets of ice cold Sols, discovered on our way out, that the pool was unlocked and went for a little unauthorized dip.

sigh.

Karaoke version of "Silent E"

Hey kidlets, sorry for being a "silent v"— the body's been numbing the mind. Got a nasal infection...Thank the snake-healer's god; I just thought I was depressed.

Turns out that my head is not filled with insanity, but thick, green, oozing snot. The doctor actually looking into my ear cavity and said "Yuk". So now I'm on some time-lapsed antibiotics to battle the bod from inside —$100 bucks for killer pills. Sigh.

Remember when I was going off about the '70s kids show "The Electric Company"? I think I was talking about how this show pretty much formed the person I am today (eclectic, ADD, in need of constant stimulation, etc.). Guess what: The Electric Company has a DVD box set coming out, and here's the awesome video trailer for it. For the love of chair, I will get this DVD set and throw an Electric Company Party. You're all invited.

P.S. I found this trailer on Apollo Pony. It is a very charming video blog.

P.P.S. I discovered it whilst touring Johnny Valentine's lapsed blogs: I guess Valentine actually fell into the sea.

Lockdown bitches!

Martha and Lil Kim, together again.

Who doesn't *heart* Perez and milkfat??? The Gwens one is great too.

Oh grow up

What's required here? A requiem, or a celebration? We've all been outed: we don't have to grow up. (Right? Right???) The article's analysis is superficial, but it manages to hit close enough to convey the delicate scent of what--desperation? Or maybe this is just what grown up now is. I don't know. Nice though that they referenced a perpetual favourite photo series, Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek's Exactitudes.

That's fucking interesting man...

I'm Meebo: good for you, terrible for business

Got the urge to instant chat, but can't sneak the appy onto your bid-ness hard drive? Because you're working for "the man", and he tracks bandwidth usage like my roomates track their new investments (like it's all a game)?

Well, here's a new IM trick to throw up your IT sleeve: Meebo

Meebo. It's so sly. You can login to all of your instant messaging services without leaving any clues.

Trust me, that pesky IT dude — you know, the one who forgets to clear your login information after he's been sneaking around your e-territory — will be none the wiser. It'll feel so glorious pulling the fibre optics over his eyes.

Now all I have to do is remember my old logins and passwords...

soeksi

indeed about the what else do you do. you hone yourself in to a working, exercising, playing and artmaking machine is what you do. right now it's all got to be fit right in but tomorrow, nae 5 years from now (inspired by the 5 ago) where do you want to be? on call, still answering business questions because it's fun and it's like problems i couldn't be bothered to solve in university (get a fucking calculator and you have to pay me to work with others being catch phrases of days gone by), making pictures and things because that's where ideas sizzle and heaven's only knows, i can't keep'em all to myself. to do so would be rude. the flow is sometimes the very long way around. the right way. the gather yourself and step in to the light way. can't imagine why who has what ideas because nothing's really happened yet. as it happens it actually gets a bit quantum which is not what i see. month after month the art mags arrive - most can be deconstructed to the desperate gasp for air we collectively suck and then sigh. so tediously linear in that you asked for my attention. then added text and told us all the things you were sad about. whatever is our malfunction? we're all guilty some of us even pay for the self flagellation. when you're rich, it's easier to job it out. i wonder if the whole of the art world is but a whore for the mind. for consciousness.

Ride Me

So there was a reason why I saved my old email conversations: torture, tormenting, and telling:

so he has emailed me already. i was telling susie i am
going to wait until he gets rich (he has a frame
company called bastard boy) and then move to
california, grow dreadlocks and teach yoga.

meeting him threw me for a wee loop - i have some serious
shit to deal with regarding my life work. this
office environment (my first real one really) makes
me absolutely ill. diane was but a small segment of
the greater problem and although i have healed from
that event something has ripped through my
subconscious.

boy has made me think about this in
totally indirect way. everyone here hassles me about
what i do. no one knows me so they judge my
appearance and it's what else do you do? when i say
i work for a bank. it's excellent really.
everything, as usual, is most surreal.

Ah, days gone by, and still the tam tam drums beat on...

Knowing me knowingst though, uh huh

Gotta love it when your weekly horoscope prophetizes your future vantage like a wolf crying at the periphery of your intuition:

"....Richard Tarnas... suggests that God is an artist--more in the mold of Shakespeare [art] than Einstein [math]. Your assignment, Gemini, is to practice seeing the world like that: as a sublime work of art crafted by a master of drama, suspense, and storytelling. In my opinion, your life these days is a lyrical example of this divine craft. "

Divine craft – how bewitching. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a unicorn.

(Mata, shouldn't that have been "Warning! Cat POO content!"??? Call me squeamish, but I can only hope those images of Live!Cat!Poo! fade from my brain soon. Cute cats, though. And respect for even attempting to train a cat--not to mention two--to do any damn thing.)

On a less scatological note, this if for those of us (read: me) who sometimes long to move back to NYC:

April 4, 2006, Manhattan


April 4, 2006, Vancouver


Cherry blossoms, sunshine and modernist crab sculpture --how lucky are we?

Warning! Cat Content!

According to Mr. Paul Kunkel author of "How to Toilet Train your Cat", it only takes 21 days to toilet train the average cat. My boyfriend is an optimistic guy who never shys away from a challenge, where as I am more of your laisse-faire kinda girl. So when boyfriend came to me with this "21 days to a litter-free home" project my first question was, "Do I have to actually do anything?" he said "No" and so I heartily agreed to the Cat Toilet Training Project.



The first several stages went surprisingly well. We (read: He) placed the litter box beside the toilet and slowly raised it up until it was at the level of the toilet. We did it a few books at a time so the cats didn't wise up to this ass jacking [I knew those Canadian Health Care Management texts would come in handy some day]. Once we were at the level of the of toilet we had to decide between Mr. Kunkel's two methods: standard or alternative.

The standard method is where you slowly slide the box over each day until it rests on top of the toilet. Once the cat is used to jumping up on the toilet you can remove the box. We quickly learned that our cats are alternative [I suspected].

The alternative method is the toilet-seat-over-the-box method.


My cat, Jones, is 19lbs of furry delight but he's not too bright. He has trouble dialing it in sometimes...


His cat, Arizona, is 8lbs of pretty princess. Her aim is much better...

but she likes to watch...


I'm afraid we can't claim resounding success with the Cat Toilet Training Project. It has now been approximately 11 weeks, we still can't use our second bathroom, we are still buying kitty litter on a regular basis and only one of the cats consistantly hits the bowl...

Maybe Mr. Kunkel's 21 days was a typo...21 weeks maybe?

Poodle Power meets Liger

I know this is old-skool viral, but the "ex-fat girl" in me just had invite the beefy spandex beauty and her pumping-poodle pals to come work the GBs for summer.

(Hmm. I suddenly smell Madonna's freshest rip-off inspiration – two years later.)

Plus, Nagi Noda's jazzy wisdom is rather good:

• The important thing is to be strong.
• Beauty and strength — this is connected to everything in life,
  connected to victory and happiness.
• Victory and happiness is important for everyone.

What a corporate art whore. Good for her, I says. Her next adventure in furry loving — $Hello Panda$ cum Liger of Napoleon Fame — should rake in the c-c-c-cash like a virgin unicorn slut trolling a Las Vegas plushy convention.

Pfft. I'm so sick of this bi/betwixt/between thing... it's so nineties.