'the adventures of a thirty-ish university graduate' or, alternately and perhaps much more aptly: 'as mad as a barking fox'

Saturday, April 28, 2007

don't you know i tried so hard to love you in my way?

there's a thick haze hanging over the city tonight, blocking the stars and the moon from sight but not from mind.

the past few days have been incredibly satisfying. i've secretly been terrified about this time for the past four months. an in-between time, a time where things are shifty. unsolid. nostalgic. there's so many things ending, and so many things beginning. rounds of goodbyes and hellos leave empty places and electric shocks in my system, a kind of sensory overload that seems to have culminated in the assertion that yes, in myself there rests a certain kind of tradition, a throwback to what i've always thought of as before.

i've spent time in bed reading charles de lint, eating slices of pear and hazelnut chocolates. i've washed the floor on my hands and knees. i've meade bread twice, washed out cupboards, reacted violently to laundry detergent. tonight i went to leslie's and in just under two hours put together an entire meal - herb whole wheat bread, roasted chicken, double layer chocolate cake, green salad, asparagus and beans steamed - from scratch that made a couple a generation older than me exclaim in delight.

this is all i want to do. i have to find some way to live before.

days filled with soft cleaners, real linen and heavy wool, fresh bread, double layer chocolate cakes, lace, open windows, fresh cut flowers, wood polish, rag rugs, books, fresh fruit, sunshine tea, coloured glass pierced with sunlight, and, most importantly, people.

people who somehow benefit from my before. somehow, i have to make my before their now, find a way to meld the two into something comprehensible and cohesive and livable and doable. something able.

it's kind of like the haze hanging in the sky - the stars still sing and the moon still smiles, even when the heavy wet banks enfold the skyline like wet wool weighs on your shoulders in the midst of a summer storm.

you know?

Friday, April 20, 2007

your love is teaching me how to

my forearms heat up first.

you'd think that maybe my face, or my nose, or the tops of my feet. but no, today, as i ventured outside in the hot spring sun, the world a jumble of exposed skin, bright colours, short skirts, wide sunglassess, and ice cream cones, it was my forearms that recognized that yes, the sun is pouring down and the sky is so blue that your eyes will hurt of you look at it for any length of time.

in my wanderings, i found an iron from the the early sixties. it was in its original box and cost me all of two dollars. the lady sellng it - her irish accent making her words more like a song than anything else - only wanted to charge me a dollar, but i insisted on the two.

tonight is the fourth year humanities party.

my debauchery senses are tingling.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

man makes a building

for some reason, i am ridiculously enamoured with bad u2 remixes currently. especially of songs from zooropa and pop. there's something about the falsetto combined with a drum machine beat and some sexy southern-sounding voices that apparently does it for me.

in other news, houdini met his match last night. apparently a combination of peanut butter and vegetable cracker was the perfect lure, as well as the perfect weight to ensure that the mouse trap would do its job. he was lucky- it was a humane and swift kill, from the look of things. i feel bad for the poor bastard though. this may or may not stem from a memory i have of when i was younger, and a half dead mouse that my mom tried to save. i know that a mouse isn't safe or good to have in a house, but i struggle with trapping them. usually nim, or runten, or boris or faxe of agnes does the job for me. but, well, he did get a lot of good last meals. if i may say so, houdini was probably going to have to move up a size in straight-jacket pretty soon.

i have three hours until my exam starts.

perhaps i should begin concentrating.

Monday, April 16, 2007

surrender, dislocate

hey, you.

i feel like i have confessions to make. i kinda of have that weird feeling in the pit of my stomach i get when i go to church, when the priest walks up to me at communion. it's hard to decribe, impossible maybe, because i've never tried before. i think it's because today has been characterised completely by the strangest disconnect between my body and my mind.

i'm stuck between here and there. now and then. limestone and granite.

chaucer, pesto, and a certain song from a certain stadium in arizona beckons. god, if i had a time machine- i can feel my stomach falling and dropping when the first chords start, when that splash of red floods the screen and my memories, and the persistant tick tick tick of drumsticks clashed against each other starts up.

it's always magic.

i aim for coherency. you could just ask, though, you know.

and that, frankly, will not fly

i woke up to slush falling from the sky.

despite the horrificness of this weather though, it's already started off as an awesome day. i can't place my finger on it, what this is. part of it stems from a kind of excitement that you get when making plans for deep summer that involve a roadtrip, the possibility of a picnic, and music heard from the rafters of an old building.

peter and lindsay and i are going to wilco at the end of june and my head may explode from sheer excitement at the possibility of fun this presents.

aaaahhhhh!

ahem.

perhaps i'd better get back to editing my take on modernity?

Sunday, April 15, 2007

this latitude weakens my knees

i'm having one of those days where all i want to do is stay in, go out, dance, nap, eat chocolate, bake, obsess about tropical fruit, be silent, scream loudly and just about everything in between.

i finished my hums take-home a few hours ago. while i know i should be rejoicing, or jumping for joy, or something like that, the nostalgic part of me is holding firm, crying out that this is the end of some place and some thing with which i have become overly comfortable. i'm questioning if i've taken too much for granted, if long nights, black-on-white typing, glasses of wine, loud music and weird snacks will be forgotten now that there's nothing left assigned for me to say.

when i left for school, four years ago, my mom slipped a card into my things. i found it, of course, while unpacking, and have had it pinned on my bulletin board in plain sight for the past four years.

what she wrote to me on the inside has just now made the most perfect sense.

i've no compass, but a hell of a horizon.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

just a change in something in the way

i hear anna's voice trailing down the stairs, calling my name at a rather odd pitch. she comes racing down, the phone in one hand, intermingled polish and english words flying out.

"there is a GIGANTIC bird in the back lot!" she exclaims.

we slowly swing open the back door. i'm expecting a mutant crow, or a blue heron, or a vulture of some sort. nothing, however, quite prepares me as a large, drab wild turkey pokes it head out from around the corner and starts pecking the ground.

three telephone calls, one long winded message to the wild bird conservatory, a bemused city offical, hilarious recorded messages about bats and rampaging moose, and a lot of laughs later, we close the door, leaving the turkey to itself because apparently, there's nothing anyone can do.

except maybe catch it and eat it.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

we said "we didn't see a thing!"

so, apparently i roast a pretty mean chicken.

in other exciting news, i have my first non-fish related official job in more than seven years. rather than cleaning fish, i'll be cleaning res rooms. i have a feeling there's going to be some terribly interesting discoveries in those first few weeks of work, because, yes, i remember what i did to my res rooms. and what other people did to theirs.

[i think that last sentence was gramatically challenged to the extreme?]

in the mean time however, i have to finish graduating. eeeeuuuugggghhhh. damned modernity. damned human condition.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

six o'clock in the morning, you're the last to hear the warning

because i'm effing challenged.

have a dose of hello:

i am irrevocably fucked for my exam tomorrow and i can't be arsed to care. what's twenty percent of a mark, really? von ranke and meinecke and bury and trevelyan can go frack themselves. ok, actually, i like trevvy- he can come and hang out with me and we'll play cricket. but everyone else- shabam!

we have a mouse in our house and we've baited all the traps with peanut butter. now, i know mice like peanut butter, but something tells me that our mouse is kind of a chocolate whore [as he was first seen trying to steal a choclate kiss] and that perhaps chocolate would have been a better choice for bait.

every person needs a creature. i'm partial to cats, but a certain snorting boston terrier seems to have wormed her way into my catalouge of acceptable creatures. i can do without the drool though, realistically. slimed marmee-gators are a bit much sometimes.

any greyhound bus ride is ruined when people suck face for most of the trip.

any greyhound bus ride is rendered awesome by the presence of mini-eggs and the x-files.

the subway will fascinate me until the day i die. especially when the drivers pull into the station at top speed when i am standing two feet from the edge of the platform, surrounded by three hundred people, all going "oooooooooooooh!" at the same time. but, i mean, it would fasciante me without the top speed oooooh-inducing factor as well. i think it's the fake underground wind.

no matter how many times i go to toronto, i am never going to be able to figure out north and south in that city. ever. or understand why construction happens at two in the morning.

i know he's an asshole, but i still love bono. and i missed the edge's meatburger effect a lot in the the past few weeks. there's something about that sound that still makes me want to stay up late with a candle and a cigarette and a piece of blank paper and a deep, rich, round pen- lines flowing like rivers in an attempt to capture something. anything. one thing.

i had that dream about virginia again last night. i think i know who she belongs to now. i think bringing it up might be weird. i think dreaming her in the first place was weird, but i can imagine how that conversation would play out, me trying to find the words, using weird nature metaphors, focusing on the ocean in the background. why the bloody ocean? i really do wonder.

i secretly love warm ginger ale.

today, i managed to get away with not putting on serious pants. but the pants i ended up wearing kind of made me feel like mc hammer. they're old hospital pants [i always wonder who wore them, if they were ever used in an institution, and if they were, what kind of institution? a hannibal lector-like institution? a plain old hospital? a place like newgate? or gotham asylum? i think the asylum could be wicked. in various and nefarious ways] faded and soft and about sixteen sizes too big. come over- we'll have a party in them.

[pervert]

i think i'm going to go to bed without having read through all of my notes even once.

muahahahahaha.

Monday, April 02, 2007

oh how it rain, oh how it pours

i just finished writing my last every undergraduate term paper evveerrrrr

i don't know whether to hurrah or not.

[probably not, because it's not one of the better ones i've written in my career. i mean, it's not horrific or anything, but i kinda lose my direction three or four times. shitty beatles].