grand pianos crash together

For one reason or another, I just cannot get started on an essay today. It's totally beautiful outside and the perfect weather for a bicycle ride. But...the essay isn't gonna write itself, and it's on a book I like, so I should really just hop to it. After this...obviously.

I'm drinking instant coffee with cinnamon and brown sugar and it's pretty stellar, surprisingly. I'm insanely broke right now, so I cooked up a huge amount of beans in tomato sauce, which I will be eating with rice for the next...long time.

Lately I haven't been into straightening my hair or shaving my armpits. Two new habits I hope I can keep up. But I've been feeling as though I'm in highschool again...Monster Days. I know I'm not a monster but a human being, but it can be hard to believe sometimes. York girls all seem to have inexplicably long, shiny, perfectly styled hair and flawless clothes. I mean, it's not a style I aspire to, but none of these women look remotely awkward...their pants aren't baggy at the knees, or too long...they don't look uncomfortable in what they're wearing. Their (incredible expensive) shoes don't have holes or salt stains (how is that possible?!) and they all carry these huge-yet-unridiculous bags.

Meanwhile I'm wearing over-washed jeans that are way too baggy at the ankles and knees and shirts I've had since highschool with my frizzy hair tucked into a hat. But I speak a lot in class, so maybe they think I'm really confident and totally down with looking the way I do. Someday I will be!

Okay, for real, I'm going to start this essay so I can go for a bike ride tonight.

SIDENOTE: If you were wondering, Hallmark Day came and went with a trip to No Frills, a homemade meal, and an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. So pretty much a typical night for my Close Personal Associate and me.

no one looks too surprised

I'm drinking green tea and listening to Billy Bragg, taking a break from this really good book my co-worker lent me. It's a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Mustafa Cherif and it's amazing. About Islam and the West, how there's no one Islam, how there's no one West, and how everyone needs to chill the fuck out about attacking religion. Haha. Oversimplified. It's a very graceful consideration of many important things. Not one-sided or anything at all, if that's how I'm making it sound.

Tired as hell. School is lots of reading. I might take a highschool chemistry class next year at night...the idea of doing a highschool course makes me nervous, but I think I might need chem 20 in order to do any programs of interest to me apres l'anglais degree. I'm so excited!

My friend Steph sent me a beautiful parcel with gifts from her and Maja. I may have mentioned this in my last quasi-drunken post. When I grow up, I want a submarine-themed Jacques Cousteau bathroom. And a pink office. Yeah, pink. Cotton candy-like. With ornate white frames with Steph's art in them.

(Oh and...by "office", I mean my own room, if I share a bedroom with someone. I think it's important to have your own space.)

Tonight CB and I supped on the finest stirfry: banana peppers, broccoli, carrots, tempeh, and red bell peppers in a thick homemade peanut sauce over brown basmati rice. I would like to be able to dedicate lots of time to every meal someday. Not just some pb & j every lunch, but something with actual vegetables and stuff. Don't get me wrong...I love the pb & j. But still.

YEAH I know I talk about food a lot, and "when I grow up". Sorry.

Things are good in the present too. I love everyone around me and work and even school is developing a faint spring-y glow when I hear sparrows chirping in the reed-thin young trees at York.

i am finally seeing

Tonight at the Red Room, Paul and Emma and Jessica and I drank so much sangria and then they started playing "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by the Postal Service. And everyone in the pub cheered so loud when Ben Gibbard sung "Smeeeaaaared black ink". Unbelievable. I used to listen to that song so much when I was 16, lying in my hammock, brittle hair snaking out from me. You know.

I also got a parcel from Steph today with the most beautiful things in it, including a silkscreen she named after me and a pair of earrings Maja made for me. It almost hurts (it does hurt) how wonderful most people are.

School is going fine, if you were wondering. I'm getting all As and A+s. After I finish this degree next year, I will do something with less theory and more practice. Like putting needles into people or listening to them talk about their problems...it depends on which program jumps to accept me first. And whether or not I'm a total flake.

Oh and...I called Ernest Hemmingway a "pretentious misogynistic blowhard" in my tutorial and my T.A., the ever-plaid-shirted Dave, laughed uncomfortably. It was awesome. I'm glad I got that off my chest.

bread and roses. i mean, essays.

So.

I'm going back to school this week, which will be weird, to say the least. I've been trying to do some work to lighten the feeling of total anxiety that will doubtless strike (haha) once I return to that Suburban Campus O'Doom. This morning I finished the longest essay that'll be due within a few weeks, only to find when I checked my email that it's due almost three weeks from now. In all reality, this is a good thing, because I'll be able to refine it and whatnot.

Later today: the starting of a short but kind of pain-in-the-ass paper on gender and power in The Bacchae and Antigone.

In other news, I've been crazy broke (croke, if you will) and thus trying to come up with Creative Kitchen Solutions (registered trademark). Last night I made some pretty good whole wheat soda bread, and currently in the oven is some raisin soda bread using the less-hardcore all-purpose flour. In case anyone doesn't know, soda bread is not filled with cream soda...it's a really dense Irish bread that doesn't use any rising agents (like yeast). So it's delicious and requires little-to-no patience! Oh, and usually it can be made with 5 or less ingredients, which is ideal.

I've also been eating a lot of rice and tempeh. Seriously looking forward to having the dough for some fresh vegetables and possibly some juice or something.

So, uh...this is likely not interesting to anyone else. And is poorly written, due to the fact that I've squeezed out an essay recently. My apologies.

Tonight I'm going to an Unsuperbowl Party. Not sure what exactly said party will entail. Meanwhile, my Close Personal Associate is going to be in small-town Southern Ontario watching two dudes beat the crap out of each other on TV. I'm thinking my time will be better spent.

little red wagon, little red bike.

I feel like if my heart was playing a board game, it would be RISK, and I'd be losing really, really badly, because all my little pieces would be spread out on different, unconnected areas of land.

Snerk snerk.

My school is going to be back in session soon. I'm prepping myself for numerous anxiety attacks.

Lately I've been drinking a lot of genmaicha tea and getting up like six times a night to pee, waking up everyone in the process. And eating vegetables. Too many. If I have to eat cauliflower or broccoli again in the next 48 hours, I'm going to hurl.

A couple nights ago, as I was falling asleep on a cramped single bed, I remembered sitting outside The Outhouse (not an actual outhouse, but a big white house on Clarence that several of my friends have lived in at various stages of my life) after a living room show with Rachel and having one the most honest conversations we had ever had. Then her and a boy who she had dated walked me home, and I remember feeling like her and I had a weirdly powerful secret.

We ended up having a secret, but it wasn't weird or powerful.

Secrets and suspension and uncertainty are usually things with a lot of potential, but that potential doesn't always arrive. That's why they're so fun and scary in the first place.

I'll post something more concrete someday.

dishes and last week's papers

V and I were talking on the phone. She was telling me about how so many of our highschool friends are in or applying for med school. How some of them aren't and are horrified with themselves.

We were in a group for "accelerated learners", which is to say, there were 40 or so of us (in a graduating class of about 200 kids) who had all our classes together and were continually told what stereotypes we fitted and given continual tips on how to stick with them. I'm being unfair. There were some great teachers. Maybe the wretchedness of highschool just casts such a program in a grisly pall.

Anyway. "Everyone's just at a crossroads, I guess," V said.

"I'm not. I'm not even at the crossroads yet."
"Me neither."

In all honesty, I don't even know where to go right now. I've been out of school since November 6th because of this bloody strike and I honestly can't imagine going back. The very thought makes me feel queasy. Working three days a week certainly isn't enough, and I'm becoming increasingly unmotivated with my own pursuits.

I need to kick my own ass.

Then again: is it so bad to be the girl who wears braids and reads books but maybe doesn't get all the metaphors and references, who works at a clinic for a decent wage (knock freaking wood) and makes her friends big vegan meals, the girl whose schedule is so flexible that when you call and say "My back hurts", she actually says "I'll be over to fix it in a moment"? I mean, I'm happy. I have more money in my CPP than anyone else I know who's my age. I feel kind of like a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.

In other news, I got a tiny parcel from some eBayer from Maryland today. Three sweet as hell E.T. necklaces that cost under $5 (shipping included). Currently sporting one of E.T. and Elliott where E.T. kind of looks like a disgusting giant penis (watch as my blog counter goes up by 2000 for use of the phrase "giant penis").

Awesomely, The Weakerthans are touring with the Constantines for the first time in four years. It's twenty-five bones, which is approximately $15 more than I've ever paid to see them, but for their sweet highschool meaningfulness, it is worth it to me. I will likely be attending with my favourite set of brothers.

If anything, I just want to hear them bring Reunion Tour alive. It's a good little album, but just didn't quite get me like, say, Left and Leaving. I know, I know. Blah blah they're poets not musicians. Whatever. They are so good at making beautiful things.

What would you say is the most thrilling beautiful process in the whole world?

I would say something involving skin, because skin is such a beautiful, thrilling organ. When I was a young teenager and had never even kissed someone or held someone's hand, I would often daydream of how I would just like to touch someone's face. To feel how someone else's anatomy fits together, I think, or maybe just because I was a painfully lonely kid who felt utterly starved for contact.


But anyway.


I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos at the moment and it, too, is thrilling and beautiful. Feeling a little bit worried about my "big brain". Something in his writing has this ability to push (gently push) at a highly sensitive point in your chest, even with the silliest things.

My bedroom is so cold. I haven't slept here much at all this week and I'm re-acclimatizing. No warm extra body for me tonight! But I'm planning on an early sleep before work tomorrow.

Incidentally, it has struck me how very very lucky I am to work where I do with the people who also do. I know that someday, when I leave that tiny chart room, I will dearly, dearly miss it.