- playing Led Zepplin songs on an electric guitar outside the bank
- coming out of the nunnery garden doing up his pants
- riding a bicycle down Vancouver Street, peddling really fast, moving really slow
- standing around outside the tax building with one foot in a cast
Tag: neighbourhood
This is a pretty great present.
Courtesy The Hawk and The Regional Assembly of Text
My new optical capabilities
On the way home from Idaho this summer, Galen and I stopped in Vancouver and got ramen at Kintaro, at Denman and Robson. I remember taking a photo of the business sign across the street, but the Lomo ate that picture and I had forgotten what was so great about the sign.
We had ramen at Kintaro again this weekend, and holy shit that sign across the street was something. Laund’rays laundry and tanning, for your pleasure:
At first I only twigged to the awesome name, so the note about tanning is kind of behind a tree. Still good.
This was the first time I’ve taken my new Christmas camera out of the house. I like the way I bonded with it right away, developed that sensory possessiveness where something feels wrong if it isn’t in my pocket. I’m not usually a gadget person (I actually don’t have any other portable electronics). Usually I’m bonded to some giant hunk of paper or textile when I’m out and about, but adding this camera to my body was eeeeasy. So tiny, and quick. Thanks, Mum and Dad.
One down
Today I bought six low-energy lightbulbs and put them in the fixtures we use the most. Kitchen mostly.
I feel virtuous and green, and also homey. Our place is a real castle lately: tidy and well-stocked, with enough places to sit. Now with environmentally sound lighting.
Soon I’ll go to rock club and see if my secret pal likes what I picked for her. Rock club is making me like my friends more. It barely comes together most times, and runs like a case study of social groups, but I like that about it. It helps me accept my friends for being human, even when they flake out or pry for attention or forget to leave room for me. We seem to be gradually adjusting the rock club setup to get the best side of most of us.
Ultimate Jamie experience
He just phoned me at 10:30 in the morning to see if I’d chopped anything yet, with the chef’s knife he gave us at 9pm last night. Reminded me to chop something that would usually stick to the knife, like a potato. It will fall right off. But then wipe the knife right away, because it isn’t stainless. Stainless steel doesn’t hold an edge.
It’s cute because he knows that can get annoying, but he forgets. It’s too exciting! The potato will fall right off!
I only write about how much I love everything
Yesterday was grading day at kung fu— with the founder of the Canadian Wing Chun association no less— and now I have kung fu fever. After an hour of practice, two hours of gradings, and an hour of staring mesmerized at Sigung demonstrating our corrections (so relaxed and flexible!), eleven of us went for dinner… for another two hours. Epic!
When I finally got home I was still a bit wired and despite it being almost midnight, Galen was not yet home from his slightly mysterious staff meeting. I distracted myself from both sources of nervous energy by trying to draw out the end of The Confusion as long as possible. Thousand page books become a familiar presence— I don’t want to finish and be lonely for my science-fiction/pirate/economics novel.
I managed to read slowly until Galen finally got home at twenty to two, totally boozored. Turns out the reason his boss thought it would be nice if everybody “dressed up a bit” for this meeting was because he was throwing a surprise five course dinner with wine pairings catered by the chef from Brio and getting them all plastered on a school night. So funny! Poor Galen came home in his dapper pink pinstripe shirt, unable to stand upright without swaying, and casting class 14 smells that I chose to blame on the duck confit. Seriously. Farts like no farts the earth has known before. I suggested we bottle some in case we ever need to make potions or spells. We could label it “Ogre Breeze” or something and keep it in the back of the pantry.
We had some excellent sleepy/wired show-and-tell, then watched half of Standing in the Shadows of Motown to keep Galen awake until he sobered up a bit. Who ever heard of a cute drunk? I seem to know a lot of boys who get extra adorable when they cross the legal limit. Galen was cuddled/sprawled under a blanket, sipping ginger ale and giggling whenever a tambourine player made an appearance on screen. Which was quite a lot.
We finally went to bed around four, and so far we’ve both managed to have real work days today anyway. This is my version of take back the night: having late-night adventures on weeknights. I don’t think I do that enough.
High holidays
Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday, balanced by Thanksgiving and New Year. I was up late at a pretty dull party, and up early for a long, slow breakfast with a lumbering behemoth of a group (my cousin’s bicycle activist tour coworkers), and now I am too tired to make witty paragraphs. It’s a list format day.
Highlights from my adventures as Bride of Frankenstein:
- So that’s how you use Tupperware to build tall hairstyles…
- Galen’s great-aunt: “So dear, you’re a ‘goth,’ aren’t you?”
- More great-aunt: “How did you get your hair so tall?” (Making me feel suddenly awkward because her everyday hairstyle is a beehive variant and I wasn’t sure whether she thought mine was ridiculous or not.)
- Dragging the hem of my white dress in puddles and mud on purpose, because it was only a bedsheet.
- Still having gray streaks in my temples at breakfast today, and getting to talk to our waiter about it. He still had metallic green fingernails from a Satan costume. We said one sentence each, I think, but I liked it. He was a good waiter. I might have had a 5-minute crush on him.
And of this Hallowe’en in general:
- Mistaking Rebecca for a couch twice, instead of recognizing the back of her California Raisin get-up.
- Walking around having serious conversations about work and responsibility and taking charge, and being taken by the snippets that passing pedestrians must have heard coming out of that Raisin, with her huge aqua-rimmed sunglasses.
- The whole city smelled like brussel sprouts. Probably from fireworks? Hopefully from some anti-loitering stink-bomb we imagined the city bureaucrats setting off.
- So many fireworks going off. I love the spectacle, but this year I was actually moved by the way pretend-bombs emphasize the absurdly peaceful and neighbourhoodly place I live. (Bang!… no flinching. “I’m sure that’s fine.”)
The whole reason I like Halloween is for the costumes. I can’t come up with a reason that costumes are important or worth a holiday, but I stand by Halloween. New Year’s I like for the cyclical celebration, and Thanksgiving because gratitude is one of the few things I practice in what could be considered a spiritual way. That one actually is important. But the costumes!
Data slob
My friend and erstwhile coworker Justin just found 1.3GB of my old MP3s in the dark recesses of his work hard drive, from last December when I was briefly stationed on his machine. He was happy to have “Common People.” Thinking about it, I believe I deposited that song on at least 3 workstations on that campus, and possibly also on a network drive.
Fangirl/pirate/slob/nomad.
Why I love costume parties
Being propositioned by a drunk couple is much funnier when the couple is Raggedy Ann and Andy.
Who’s a sexpot
For several years I’ve been percolating on a project relating to beauty. Specifically, I’m into people’s differing tastes. I love overhearing people behind me at a movie having a conversation that goes:
“Why didn’t you tell me your friend was so good looking? I would have worn a clean shirt.”
“What, so-and-so? I can’t believe you find him attractive!”
Just now I walked a block or two with a couple of girls from the neighbourhood, and one was going apey for a local trumpet player’s looks. Getting only vague support from her friend and me. Awesome.
I have practically no taste in common with my friends. Whenever Rebecca thinks someone is really beautiful, they just look really skinny to me. Kelby’s definition of beautiful women seems totally random to me. Growing up, I thought I just had immature taste because I could never predict who my mum would declare “beautiful,” but I still don’t agree with her most of the time.
I love this. I love that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so obviously. This is what I think about whenever anyone gripes about the evolution of sexual attraction or the media’s portrayal of women. I think: but none of my friends can agree on who’s a sexpot. I think: I can dress however I like, and someone somewhere will drool.
Galen and I have nearly identical ideas about both male and female beauty, which is a fun thing to have in common. I had forgotten, until I started making a list of my friends who have weird taste in hotties, that we used to say we had the same taste in girls. Right before the two of us got together, Rebecca made the connection that a girl I’d been a bit obsessed with the previous summer was Galen’s girlfriend at the time. That was one of the things that got counted as fate during the infatuation stage.
Now with more catcalls.
About four days ago I decided to make an effort to look more hot, since that’s a pursuit I usually neglect. This basically involved buying a second pair of pants and making a point of brushing my hair.
Results: astounding. Even in the depths of my teenaged depression I was able to appreciate my body as it was, so I’m used to feeling generally happy about my looks. More interesting is the way that every day since my resolution, at least one stranger has complimented or catcalled me.
It feels a little conspicuous, like ““movie stars get their hair cut every day so no one will notice and make fun of them, like at our school”:http://www.kithfan.org/work/transcripts/four/gavpreach.html,” but I can ride it out. I like seeing cute people out and about, so it’s pretty fun to contribute my own cuteness to the neighbourhood. It makes me happy about our neighbourhood that my take on hotness can fly here.
Since I haven’t always been successful at this mission, I’d like to catalogue a few points in case I get off track again later.
- Spending money on my hair is always worth it.
- Exercising: also worth it.
- Clothes that fit. Give the other ones away! I’d rather wear the same awesome skirt three times a week than rotate through a selection of almost-good clothes.
- More than one of things. One scarf solves a problem, but two scarves is more fun. Further, both will last longer.
- Newer clothes look better because they aren’t worn out.
Generally, my barriers to hotness are laziness and being a cheapskate.
Seitan, alchemy, the pantry
i am eating homemade seitan! i was resigned to creating an inedible learning experience on my first try (or two), but the results of this first attempt are just fine. a little denser than the packaged stuff i usually buy, but tasty. best of all, a $5 bag of vital wheat gluten looks like it will produce at least 12 packages worth (street value $36).
(for the uninitiated: seitan is a chewy vegetarian protein source, made by boiling a dough made from wheat gluten. also known as wheat cutlets, and the usual ingredient in mock chicken dishes. these are my seitan recipes.)
i don’t yet understand the correlation between pre-boiling consistency and final product. the transformation from wheat flour to fake meat is a weird one. i thought my dough would fall apart during boiling for sure, but it came out huge and puffy and dense. how can something be puffy and dense? meat replacement is alchemy. next time i won’t knead it so much.
this reminds me of canning, in that i have a giant and very heartening stash of seitan in the fridge now. galen wisely asked if seitan could be frozen. at that point, it would become a full-fledged member of the long-term food stores, which is always a satisfying occasion.
the pantry seems so noble, despite being basically a glorification of material gain. maybe the nobility comes from crediting outside sources (the bounty, the harvest, the earth, the fields!) for the treasure. or from the alchemy of turning cheap raw materials into valuable stores using a laborious ritual. (and such a ritual! complete with charts of numbers, specialized glassware, rules that can be bent and rules that can’t.)