christmas in london

^^^could be worse!

today is the worst

these things are making it better








now if someone could bring me some scotch.

yeah... i don't really like kids either

So this bi-partisan resolution that is apparently polling at 91% approval among the American public will be vetoed by Bush if it passes:

sorry, your child isn't worth 61 cents to me

Bush doesn't want a 61 cent Federal tax added on to cigarette purchases (with the revenue going towards health insurance for the 9 million uninsured children in the US) b/c he's "philisophically" opposed to it. Brilliant. For a nation who had to have the title of a Harry Potter movie altered from "The Philosopher's Stone" to "The Sorcerer's Stone" because people didn't know what a philosopher was, this is basically a perfect strategy to completely mystify the public and quell any protest.

Why do I continue to be shocked by the things this man does?

dance party! (help me buy groceries pls)

I smashed in a Honda. I bought it a new door. Now I'm like, 3rd World poor. Come to my party!

The lurid details

blood, dirt, chinese philosophy

on my way to isis' this dog came out of nowhere in the park, off the leash, on the dirt path by crawford. totally took me and my bike out. and i'm lying in the dirt and my bike is on top of me and the owner is apologizing and the dog is barking. this nice lady is patting my hair and telling me about the I Ching and how i must have a lot going on in my life because i'm a moving target or at least that is what the I Ching would call me. i may have hit my head. then eric from enterprise rent a car brings me a glass of water. i can't hold the water because my hands are shaking so the ice cubes are just clashing around violently in the cup. actually it was a wine glass. eric has two big diamond earrings and he's come out of this house beside the park where there are about 8 teenage boys yelling at him to "get her number, dog!" he once took two days off my car rental fees because i hated the neon i rented from them so much. he rides my bike around to make sure it isn't broken. the I Ching lady takes me to her house and cleans dirt out of my cuts and gives me tea. the dog owner knows cameron and elyse because they have the same breed of dog. the dog isn't hurt. she lets me pet her.

i've had enough crashes for awhile.

anyway, i think this is what the I Ching lady meant:

uhhhhh... yay china?

This is completely and exactly how I would deal with white collar crime *if* I were a dictator (I AM TOTALLY A DICTATOR!). None of this Scooter Libby shit for corporate actors or politicians who show complete disregard for human life. I don't generally support the death penalty, but for the exception of people who show a premeditated and calculated pattern of behavior that basically amounts to murder, like the douchebag referred to above.

come over

make me a snack, i'm kind of hungry/lazy. paint my nails for me. wash my sheets and towels. the recycling hasn't been taken out in weeks. there is more in the garage. read me that book that's been sitting on my shelf for the last month. after we finish my april issue of rolling stone. make me get a haircut. make me eat a vegetable. how old is that stuff in the fridge? throw it out. lets sleep for more than 6 hours and then make our own coffee in the morning. bring your favourite movie that i've never seen. give the dog a cookie. unplug the computer. i'm waiting.

post secret

Tonight my friend Isis and I went to OCAD to hear Frank Warren speak about his community arts project Post Secret. Isis and I are both named after Bob Dylan songs. I feel that its a real bonding factor in our friendship. That, and the fact that she is hilarious and really fucking smart.

Anyway, Post Secret is actually amazing, it was started in 2004 (I think... fuck I'm bad at dates... oh the double entendre! Hahahahah! HAH! Sob!). Moving on: people from all over the world have sent this guy anonymous postcards that they have made and written a secret on, something that they haven't told anyone. Sometimes they're hilarious, and sometimes reading them makes you feel like you've been kicked in the stomach. Its weird/reassuring that certain things are just so terrible, but so universal. Frank said that he gets a lot of cards about suicide, and a lot about peeing in the shower.

He has all these secrets mailed to his home address, he gets about 1000/week. Then he posts 20 on his blog every Sunday. He's also published them in 3 different books. He talked about how he felt that making art wasn't about studying or formal training and more about the personal courage needed to take something you've made and show it to other people. That totally resonated with me. I know that if I were to send in a postcard (and I probably will), it would be something really fucking emo or emo-political or emo-ironic. Something I would deride as being completely lame if the lights were on and everyone could see me. Oh fuck, we're bordering on dramatic here. Also, bordering on using the word "fuck" one too many times in a note. Just check out his blog:

Post Secret

Thank god for the photographer passed out on my couch last night

I came home with the intention of writing a rllly drunken, emo blog (I think I would have referred repeatedly to "the scene"...eep). But there was some dude sleeping beside my computer. Phew!

I read ink

I've been reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle since I found it last week in a used book store in London. Shockingly, its fucking depressing. Like Sylvia-Plath-writing-about-terminally-ill-children-in-the-Sudan-depressing. Its a 400+ page novel that describes the minutiae of three days worth of living in a part of the Russian gulag designated for professionals and academics. While they aren't made to do hard labour like the other prisoners, they're still captives of Stalin's Soviet government. The title references Dante's first circle of Hell and the limbo-like state these guys live in. I'm at the part where its looking as though they are about to sacrifice themselves to the hard labour camps in Siberia in order to make some sort of moral point. I'm missing Nabokov, he never moralizes.



Anyway, it was all getting to be a bit heavy and doing absolutely nothing for my mood, so I switched. I'm now re-reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I find it hilarious. It makes me laugh out loud, which books rarely do. But I've read it already, and everything I bought last weekend is in the same depressing vein as The First Circle, with the exception of the Anais Nin, but I don't think I can deal with her right now... so basically this was a long-winded plea for summer reading recommendations/book loans. I can deal with "dark" or even "bleak", just not "hopeless" or also anything with the word "Shopaholic" in the title. Go.

puppies, rainbows and motherfucking sunshine, ok?

RIGHT HERE.

ok, i get it, you're in "love"

Yesterday I was walking down the street, in a good mood (read: Bailey's in my coffee) with Ela when she decides to do one of her characteristic middle-of-the-sidewalk (why wait for grass?) poops. Not a big deal. She finishes, I pick up, we're good. But as I look up, there's a wall of people coming down the sidewalk towards me. Fine, we can squeeze through, only the people I'm trying to squeeze past are a couple, holding hands, and apparently, unwilling to let go.

Instead, they lift their arms making a little arch for me, dog, and dog poop, to pass under. Problem: they're like, 5'3 and 5'7, respectively. I'm 5'9 and wearing heels. Its fucking ridiculous. Really? You can't unclasp hands for the 2.5 seconds it will take me to get by you? I have to crouch down to pass under your midget-bridge? If I hadn't had a leash in one hand and a bag of shit in the other I totally would have karate chopped their hands apart.

I'm so alone.

I locked up my bike on Queen St. today and was gone for about 4 hrs before I got back to find that I had left the book I had just bought in my bike basket. It was Nabokov's Glory. Does no one else like Russian Lit? This is Toronto, not Pleasantville. Why the fuck didn't anyone steal it?

bandaids

why are cnn and george bush talking about metal detectors in colleges and a comforting loving god and not fucking gun control? why can't i change the channel? god damn.

spoke too soon

so glad its march!

*sniff*......... SOB!!!

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.

"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.

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..

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.

cold war nostalgia

In 1978 Georgi Markov was killed in London after being stabbed with a poison dart that was fired from an umbrella. A Bulgarian dissident, Markov was suspected to have been killed by a team made up of Russian KGB officers and Bulgarian secret police. The dart was filled with the poison Ricin, and Markov was dead in four days.

In 2001 the US attempted to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar. A major 100-man commando raid in tandem with an air strike killed his son and two brothers while hitting a Red Cross station and killing several civilians. Mullah Omar was unharmed.


In early November of last year, a former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned in London by a radioactive material called polonium 210. It appears that he ingested it, perhaps at a sushi bar. It caused his body to react as though he had been receiving intense chemotherapy treatments, as his hair fell out and he lost weight rapidly. Some scientists liken the poisoning to the ingestion of a tiny nuclear bomb. While many in London, who may have come in contact with Mr. Litvinenko are undergoing testing for exposure, Litvinenko is thus far, the only person to have fallen ill.

The US has a policy against assassinating foreign leaders, instead they invade a country and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians? Personally, I would prefer to read headlines like "Saddam killed by exploding wrist-watch" or "Taliban leader falls victim to ebola-laced goat meat" rather than the "Deadliest day in Iraq since (insert random milestone here)" line the NY Times seems to run daily.

It isn't that I condone what the Russians did, I just like their style. They didn't bomb the London subway system, they just cheffed up some nuclear sushi and took out their target.

I miss the Cold War.