GBS roster doubles

Look to your right and scroll down. You see? There are three new additions to the GBS posse of... ahem. Please let me introduce you to Dark Whimsey, Heidi Lament and Figure8.

These three GBs are currently ghosts in the machine — silent partners if you will. But they shall be silent no more, dammit. Come on ladies, get thee to thy posting stations. And post. It only costs pennies a day. For serious.

Prodigal dream

No word yet about my prodigal computer.

But I'm sure she's going to come back to me wearing an amazing technicolour dreamsuit*. It's going to be a teary-eyed reunion that's for sure. We will run toward each other (yes, appendages akimbo) — her dreamsuit flapping in the wind with little musical notes trailing off it like audible bubbles; my Frye boots sprinting the ground like a new-born colt, or fillie, or whatever little baby horses are called.

When we embrace like long lost sisters, it's going to be beautiful.

And then I'll frickin' slap her. And tell her to never ever do that to me again.

I'll cry how could you do this to me? Me — the person who clothed you, fed you, sang you sleep every night and occasionally jacked up your RAM.

*I have no idea what Joseph's suit looked like or why he was wearing one, but I do know that my computer's technical-colour wardrobe will be magical! No more keyboard for entering text — what I think will simply appear... perfectly edited. No more tiny grains of sand in hourglasses reminding me that time is slipping away. No more burning plastic. She will trail the faint scent of lavender or violet, cook me dinners and make my bed.

Mac meltdown

So, I finally got my G5 imac hooked up to the Interweb and what happens? It has a full-on, stinkin' meldown.

My beloved computer is now officially the wicked witch of the world wide web. Boo.

I don't mind a bloated body, but I do mind a bloated computer chip. I can't afford Jenny Craig for my computer. And it's not like you can take it out and exercise the sucker so it remains a lean, mean blogging machine.

If you google "20" G5 imac burning smell," you get this thread of pissed-off mac users (scroll down to the comments). I guess this burning sensation is a common "issue" with the first-gen imacs. Recall is not an option, as my year warranty expired 4 months ago. (Thank goodness for London Drugs insurance — for once my decision to purchase extra insurance has come in handy.)

I'm so sad right now. So sad. I feel so disillusioned... and out of touch.

Siblings

Funny that Mata should post about siblings (and dishwashers--god, I want one again so badly). Is it that time of year? I got to be with my two (siblings, not dishwashers) a few weekends ago, for the first time since my brother got married in October. Although Jen isn't my blood sister she might as well be. We met at age three when I walked onto the sidewalk in front of my Kerrisdale house and saw a little girl of my own height. "Want to play?" we asked one another. We've been sisters ever since. My brother I just love. Jen and I used to hold him down (one on each arm) and spit in his mouth. Totally gross, but he seems to have forgiven us and turned out OK in spite of it.

I miss them a lot when I don't see them.

*my childhood...7:12pm most every night*

"Girrrrrllls! " *my mother* "Diiishhesss!"

and the negotiations would begin.

My sister hates doing the dishes.

My sister is the only unmarried woman I know who's mates have willingly bought her appliances.
Twice!
Two different boys have purchased dishwashers for my sister. And I understand why.

Nothing can turn that little-ray-of-sunshine (poetic license) into the coldest, darkest day of nuclear winter faster than the prospect of a full sink of dishes. Both those boys knew that a couple of hundred bucks for a dishwasher was a freakin' bargain.

*my sister* "I'm not doing the pots!"

*me* "Why do I always have to do the pots?!"

*my sister* "Well, I'm not doing them!"

*my mother* "Girls!"

*me* "Fine!" *whispered* "but you're doing all the plates, all the glasses and the utensils."

*my sister* "Na-Uh! No way am I doing the utensils too!"

*me* "That's not fair! Why do I always have to utensils?!"

"GIRLS!" *guess who*

This is the point where my sister washes the glasses and the plates, making gross-out faces and gagging whenever her hands come in contact with anything that is not either water, porcelain or glass. Then I follow-up by doing all other dishes in the house.

I'm not bitter. *that's a lie*

I just wish that as an eleven year old I had been bright enough to spend my allowance on a Whirlpool instead of on all those Tigerbeats.

Bob Ross of grammar

Meet Mary Rackham, retired school teacher and Cosy English Courses founder. She truly is the Bob Ross of grammar.

"Why Grammar?" (.mov).
Orcas for interjection! (.mov)
Her giggles kill me. (.mov)
I can't get enough of her Cosy English Courses video clips.

"It is difficult to be creative at an-knee-thing if you do not have the technique first."

Solar chimney

It's like all the hot air has been sapped out of me with no cool breeze to replace it.

• Still no home Internt machine.
• The boy roomate doesn't understand why I requested that he lock the doors when he's the last to leave. (He'll be even more confused when I ask NOT to put his front-door key in the mail box, which is half-a-foot away from the lock.)
• The girl roomate and I are having a kitchen party on Friday. Yes it includes drinking. No you're not invited. We're re-arranging the cupboards. I am a wild party.
• I got my eyebrows threaded and it now looks like I have had a good cry.
• I go to Vegas next Tuesday for a bid-ness meeting. I've heard they sell champagne from Slurpee machines. How GBS is that? I'll toast you all when I'm there.
  
• Men from Chicago think I'm smashing. But those men in Vancouver are seriously lacking. I have learned to love the warm embrace of my pillow.
  

Posting and Interneting on Monday. Now baby's got to book a co-op car to get the last household dregs from there to here.

Museum of Food Anomalies

Now playing in the SCI-FI Theater: "IT CAME FROM THE FARMER'S MARKET!"

This sour sucker reminds me of that part in Aliens 3 when cloned Ripley sees the failed versions of herself.

Weird food anomolies at the MoFA... Evil pancakes, ghostly cereal, egg bunnies, placenta sack bacon — I'm never eating breakfast again!

Is your cat a Cylon?

I have recently begun to suspect that one or both of my cats may be a Cylon agent. The one cat in particular is exhibiting distinctly Cylon-esque behavior.

The cat in question actually belongs to my BF and she hates women. We have always been more than a little dubious of each other, but we have an understanding...I don't look at her or touch her and she doesn't strike at my face. Simple enough, non?

But then recently she has begun to warm up to me. She has even actually approached me for pets on occasion. However, just when she has me lulled into a false sense of fuzzy affection...WHAM! She nails me, sharp-side up!

Ergo, she's a frackin' Cylon.



Do you suspect that your cat is secretly attempting to bring down the human race, starting with you?
Here are some telling signs to watch for:

1. Toys with prey, torturing it slowly before delightedly killing without mercy.
2. Attempts to convince you of it's love and devotion only to wake you up in the night by pouncing on your head and biting your hair.
3. Purrs while kneading your bare flesh with it's claws.
4. Stands on your keyboard, which results in inappropriate email sendage.
5. Shreds new items of clothing or furniture purchased solely to impress prospective employers or mates.
6. Vomits hairballs onto bathroom mat in the night, guaranteeing you step in said hairball in the morning.
7. Refuses attempts to reduce further hairball incidents by clawing, biting and hissing during brushing.
8. Covers all surfaces in clingy, allergen-ridden hair causing friends and family to avoid your home like Wednesdays at the downtown eastside Army and Navy.

Open call for Little Singapore

May I have your attention please.



STOP SPITTING!!

I have very few civic pet peeves but public spitting is one of them. (The other one is people who ride their bike on the sidewalk but I have occasionally been guilty of this one myself so I will stifle that particular rant.)

I would rather see an increase in public urinating or see people who don't clean up after their shitzus given Caban giftcards rather than see one more public spitter go unpunished. I know all of the justification for laws against spitting; it's unsanitary, it spreads disease, and the like. But I actually don't care about all the SARS and tuberculosis being absent-mindedly horcked onto our streets...I just find the practice itself repugnant and I want it to stop.

Even after the dirty little spitter has consummated his (and yes it is usually boys whom I see phlegm-tagging my streets) act of public defiance, I still have to deal with the remnant spatter. If these little piss-ants want to defile their country why don't they just quietly continue not to vote. Speaking of which, if we must have this painfully conservative government in office, why don't we put their foibles to use for us??

I call for the reinstitution of corporal punishment for all public spitters! Let's take a page from Singapore's book and flay the little expectorators! (Actually spitters in Singapore just get a fine or at worst a couple of hours of community service, but I DON'T CARE! I'm on a roll!) I realize that there is no evidence that corporal punishment has any deterrent effect but I do not care. I just want to smack these little shits...HARD!

I wouldn't want to see our court system bogged down with countless numbers of public loogie-launchers so I propose no legal trappings associated with my plan. Think of it more as a system of negative reinforcement. Citizens now have carte-blanche. If you see someone horck on the street, you will be fully within your legal rights to flick them in the nutsack and scream "Why don't you just go home and watch Miami Ink, ya little malcontent!". In fact it will be your civic duty.


*deepsigh* That feels better.

Alright...as you were.

Off the grid

No Internet
No TV
No social life...
No GBS service

LiveNudeGirls

This show featuring Audrey Kawasaki at Seattle's Roq la Rue gallery looks interesting. The opening party is July 7. For some reason I bet there will be hot girls there.

I want to say I'm over the "melancholy/sexy/disturbing/infanta-woman" thing in painting, started, I suppose by John Currin, or Balthus. No, wait, that's not true, as this slightly-strange blog of nude women in art (photos of Keira Knightley and Audrey Hepburn making the only discordant appearances) reminds me. Duh. Talk about a scrolling feast of nipples and curves and pubic hair. I thought the Rodin nude was going to lift her head, toss her hair and look me in the eye.

As for Kawasaki's stuff, it took me a minute before I figured out what this painting:



reminded me of:



I wonder if Egon got them to pose for this, or whether it was uh, more journalistic. Anyway. Enough nipples and curves--it's after 4 on a Friday long weekend and this particular set of nipples and curves are out of here.

It's a cruel (cruel), cruel summah...

It's that time again. Time to pack more clothes than I am ever going to wear into my backpack, along with too little sunscreen and barely enough music; pile into a friend's over-hot car and drive over the horizon.

ROAD TRIP!

No, it is not going to be some testoerone-fueled-Tom-Greenesque fiasco. This weekend is girls-only and these bitches is classy. (props to KLJ for organizing our asses). Think wine soaked, sun drenched, and estrogen sopped.

I see dancing, gossiping, sun-bathing, croquet-whacking, wine-touring and talking 'til we are so parched that we simply have to crack another bottle of that darling Char.

*soexcitedmustrunaroundincirclesflappingarms*

Reality...I will deal with you in four days time.

Moving on

Kitchen =
4 boxes, 1 table, 3 chairs, 1 microwave
Bathroom =
1 box
Books =
8 boxes
Clothes =
4 garbage bags
Bedroom =
1 box-spring mattress, 1 small dresser, 1 lamp, 1 table
Study =
2 boxes, 1 computer, 1 lamp, 1 chair, 1 file cabinet
Living room =
zero, zip, zilch
...And there you have it, my life summary.

One day I may live like an adult — one day.

Heavy metal dream

Ugh. I had the most unusually mundane wake-up mare:

I was at work, slaving at my desk. I went to get a file, found a trap door in the floor leading into a cavernous medieval "basement" (think the movie Labrynth). I accidentally dropped a light torch down the 113,582 steps. After a minute, the sound of the light smacking the ground echoed back to me, carrying with it a human-sounding scuttle. I got scared and scurried back to my desk.

My light drop woke an anglo-saxon ogre demon who ripped open the trap door and tore through my workplace like a hot knife slicing butter. His metal interior ripped through his bloodied flesh, tip-of-the-iceburg-style, and flayed a good portion of the nameless co-workers.

So, once he re-staked his territory, a.k.a my transifgured workplace, in blood, the remaining crew sat around a mead hall table and shot the shit with heavy metal ogre in all their pre-Medieval finery.

I started to realize that all of his joints were turning green and spent the last part of my dream trying to figure out why that was happening... How come I find this the most disturbing part?

Kingpin crow punch

Sometimes I feel totally aligned with the cosmo. I feel so tapped in to "the force" that I lose my body to the greater world; I become one with it.

That's how I was feeling when I punched a crow.

I love crows. I love their scruffy colour, their too smart urban ways, and their brooding and witchy demeanors. They can live for a hundred years, which is why, I suppose, they are so wily. My roomate calls crows the mafia of the bird world. I think this is a very apt description. So if you want to outwit a crow and gain their respect, you've got to act like a crow. Capiche?

In my "at one with the world" state I espied a crow about three meters away, perched on a low slung evergreen branch. Its body was rhythmically bobbing up and down on its eely stick legs. I calmly thought to myself: this crow is going to swoop me.

Have you ever been swooped by a crow? At certain times in the year, crows swoop humans. Nobody knows why they swoop. Some conjecture that it's a mating season thang, other's surmise it's a nest building season thang, but I believe it's part of their "pestering humans" festivities. It's like running with the bull — just as inane and dangerous and equally as fun... for the crows that is.

So sure enough that beady-eyed crow, sitting antsy on its natural perch, started to lackadaisically swoop me. But the distance between us was so short that it was still in take-off mode as it neared my naked head. Without realizing quite what I was doing (but with complete intention) I punched that wily crow.

And for a split second after I punched the crow (lightly), it just hovered vertically in the air, wings flapping with this shocked expression on its face — not wounded, but shocked. I just looked back at it with the best crow eyes I could muster, deep, wise and unphased.

I punched a crow and looked dead straight into his all-knowing eyes. Now, how many people get to do that in one lifetime?

I see it as a sign.

Day tripper

Let me tell you now: women walk in matching pairs.

Mata and I were tromping along the seawall last night and all we saw was a sea of conjoined semi-athletic outfits. If it was the eighties, they'd be wearing braided headbands, Reebok aerobic hightops and wrist weights. But alas, gone are those spandexy days... mostly. This new breed of ladies is all about the Lululemon booty boosting pants and straight, flowing hair. It's an addiction, I tell you, a fashion addiction. I kept thinking to myself, Valley of the Lululemon Pants.

Of course, if you're a man who likes women with a bit of booty, I'd recommend getting out into urban nature and trolling the sea wall with free Lululemon schwag ... and puppies.

Idol Chat

"Billy Idol used to rock the house, man!

Not just Mony Mony either. I mean, Mony Mony must be Billy Idol's nemesis. It's so not his best tune.

Think of Flesh For Fantasy. Now that's a fucking good tune."

Date-star galactica

So, at my life coach's urging (read: a really good friend who is better at dating than I am), I have signed up on a couple of online dating sites. And I find it a very humbling, and fascinating, process.

Being online all the time, I've been loath to take my one fleshy connection online. But, well, I'm getting older, and all my friends are hitched so I figured I'd give it a whirl (after a really challenging mental battle, calling myself a geek, then realizing that I'm okay with being one).

Here are the things I discovered about the whole registration process:

1. It takes forever.
2. Wine helps you write your personal bio — wit and humor increases making you seem much more charming and effervescent.
3. If you say that you like discovering Jungian archetypes in Battlestar Galactica, you get tons, and I mean tons, of emails from a certain segment of the population who just want to talk plot and motive with you. Except for one guy who put: "I like Battlestar Galactica too. Clearly, we should fuck."
4. You get these wink things, but have no idea what to do with them.
5. Based on the pictures of men you age, you realize that you're an adult now.

Now, I've realized that there is some fascinating things to day about pictures, but I'll leave that for the next post. This one may take more than my 10 min max writing time.

To My Ken Dolls:

To my Injection-molded Hair and Underpants Ken:
I got you when I was too young to know the potential play you held for me. Let me say that when I think of you now, it is with humour and horror. My only regret is not going to the Prom with you. You came with that hot tux that matched my favorite dress and everything.

To my Country and Western Ken:
How I loved to hear you sing. If only you would have kept singing...and kept your mouth shut at all other times. You would have never missed a note. And if only I'd gotten you while you still had the damn cowboy boots.

To my Rock n Roll Ken:
I tired of you so quickly when I realized you were just like all my other Ken dolls, except you came with a guitar and a tattoo.

To my Math Is Hard Ken:
You made me do my homework. I was the perfect Barbie for you. But then I realized Jem always had more fun than Barbie. Sorry. One day your Babs will come.