wrecking ball

sometimes i really love my job. not the actual job part of the job but the lack of a schedule and the freedom to take a two hour walk in the afternoon with ela, jeff, and coffee. such a perfect day. sun swung in like a wrecking ball, smashing this awful, grey february sky that i feel like i've been staring into for so long now. so many people out on the street, out of hibernation. puddles like lakes instead of mountains of snow. one day til march.

just me?

Or does Steve Carell (of Daily Show and Little Miss Sunshine fame)...


look just like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (of Israel has no right to exist and I am a crazy extremist who is destroying an otherwise incredible society fame)?

pink elephants

Thanks to Carrie, I read a lot about fetuses, neonates (what docs refer to babies as!) and the nastiness that can occur when someone is kooky enough to get themselves knocked up. Even a perfectly healthy pregnancy is like a Japanese horror film that lasts nine months. But, when your best friend is in med school and asks you to edit papers for her, you become exposed to some pretty unique medical nightmares. Google "stone baby". I fucking dare you.

So I've come to view the fetus as a gross and somewhat dangerous phenomenon. Pics of them generally freak me out, however, I found this on National Geographic.



Elephant fetus! I won't lie. I THINK IT'S SO CUTE!!! And it looks a little like the Elephants in Fantasia. Only a little less creepy. .

"destruction is an obstruction for construction"

I'm always about 6 months behind when it comes to "the" movie to see. I think that the only Oscar-nominated movie I've seen for this year is Little Miss Sunshine. I just never watch tv and never see previews so most of my film-related info comes from the reviews in Now magazine and more than once, I've gone to Queen Video, stared at the racks for 40 minutes, and left empty-handed. Last week though, my roommate came home with The Science of Sleep and I loved it. Same director as Eternal Sunshine and watching it gave me the same feeling about how tenuous our grip on reality seems to be, when it comes to what is "real" and what is perceived by our brains/hearts.

Stephane can't seem to tell the difference between what he dreams and what he lives while awake. In real life he has a job cutting and pasting together calendar mock-ups, in his dreams he is the over-lord of everyone in his office and has his own talk show. With an egg carton and corrugated cardboard set. The special-effects are low-tech, stop-animation stuff, and amount to Stephane building his grandiose ideas and dreams literally out of garbage. I really like that metaphor for the astronomical heights of success (monetary and other) that are expected of us, and the obsolete tools we're told to use in order to get there. Am I being melodramatic?



I like that the closest and most intimate relationships Stephane has with other people are in his dreams and his real life interactions with people are painfully awkward to watch. I'm shy, I totally relate. I also like that he is a drummer, in a band, in a bear suit.

peas and cheese

I just had Ghandi last night. But they make the best rotis. I think I could eat them everyday. I'm afraid to find out how bad they are for you. My favourite is the muttar paneer which is filled with lots of green peas and some strange sort of cheese in little blocks. Half is just enough for dinner and the left overs are good, especially when you get home from a night of drinks and need a snack. I wish I lived a little further away from their convenient Bathurst and Queen location, or that I had a little more will-power.

msn

jeff and ryan are ignoring me to talk to each other. ugh. gays these days.

theme parks

Mexico has a new tourist attraction. Visitors can pay to pretend that they are Mexican migrants trying to illegally cross the border into the United States. Fake border patrol guards patrol a fake border and shoot fake bullets at you as you try to escape your fake economic oppression for a "better life" in the US, which, as it turns out, is pretty much a sham too.

I can understand, at least objectively, the ethos of "anything to make a buck", especially in an impoverished country. But what kind of people are sick enough to "play" this "game"? Are they really sympathetic souls who want to experience the suffering of the pauvre Mexican migrant? Bullshit. It's totally Texan frat boys, drunk, mocking and belligerent. At $15 USD, not too many Mexicans are using this service as a practice run for the real thing. Hideous..

not joking

my company has a "do not blog about this" clause on all their contracts now.

wow.

global warming ready

My friend Claire was telling me about these ads before I started seeing them in Nylon, Vice and other hipster-ish rags that I love and read faithfully. I've never been a fan of Diesel's fashion, always thought their look was a little too College-Street-Party-Crowd for me, but I had a boyfriend who wore their runners and I didn't mind those. That boyfriend is getting an email! Burn your Diesel. This is hideous:





The caption in the bottom left hand corner reads "Global Warming Ready" (for those of you with tiny lap top monitors). And while the first ad is offensive and stupid, the second one is that plus gross! "Here, darling, you look thirsty! Have some of this toxic water I just scooped up from what used to be our filthy city street. PS, its salt water and will likely dehydrate you to the point of death!" Ugh.

While fashion ads aren't expected to be anything more than vacuous and beautiful depictions of a designer's work (perhaps with the exception of labels like Kenneth Cole or Benetton, known for their political activism), these definitely go beyond the mildly annoying de rigueur of skinny girls holding ridiculously over-priced bags (bags and skinniness, by the way, both coveted by me). My point though, is that Diesel, instead of denying Global Warming, is glamorizing it. I can't decide if thats better or worse.

Personally I think that the flooded city ad is frightening, so maybe it will actually alert those who view it to the reality of the problem. But the focus is on the models and the city is merely a backdrop, and its pretty, there's no debris or dead bodies floating by like we saw in the real flood in New Orleans. The Paris ad though, turns the city into a tropical paradise... where's the scare factor here? I won't even touch on the completely and utterly unrealistic factor. Ugh, again.

Yes, I get that these ads are supposed to be ironic and humourous. But I don't find it funny. Maybe my sense of humour sucks or maybe I'm, as one 'friend' puts it "a dogmatic leftist bullshitter". Either way, I hate Diesel.

economy of space

My new bed is 5 ladder rungs above the ground. It sucks when you wake up in the morning and have forgotten this important fact. It sucks when you wake up in the night after too much Jager (it was free, ok?) and don't feel so well. But its cozy and Ela hasn't learned to climb ladders yet so I don't have to share.



"I sleep on the floor now." face