subterrain | Entries tagged with rl

Today while we were on our way into the fifth stop on the local Artist Home & Studio Tour that

delighter used her artistic connexxxions to get us in on, an angelic child stopped us.

Parentless, jacketless, blue-eyed and floppy-haired, this pre-pubescent kid chided gently: "Don't forget it's Earth Hour tonight at 8:30."

Don't worry, conscientious boy! I won't, thanks to you! I'm going to light some candles, pre-air-pop some corn kernels with some pre-melted butter and some pre-sprinkled nutritional yeast, and read some text in an ancient format.

It's gonna be sweet, in a then-I'll-turn-my-lights-back-on-and-brag-about-it-later kind of way. This is Alberta, after all.

PS. did you know that the energy associated with moving each MB of data around online is on par with burning a lump of coal? So says this dude, anywayz, in with his babble about models and libraries and other sundry:

Current Location: cowtown

Holy crap, this city loves St. Patrick's Day. On the drive/walk between the sushi place and my apartment, at 7pm, I saw:

a pair of young long-locked gentlemen, one of whom copped a leprechaun accent and said "And a happy St. Paddy's day to you fine folks!" while doffing his hat in a practiced bow as he swept past. A google imagesearch for top of the mornin to ye yielded this fine fellow, who can stand in as a semi-accurate visual. Except the hat was a bowler and he was wearing a cape (?).
a very angry-looking young lady in expensive 4 inch pumps and green and white wide-horizontal-striped tights, stalking down the street towards whatever faux-pub might stand to serve her green beer.
a young lady smoking outside of Bob the Fish in American Apparel kelly green piped running hot pants and matching soccer socks: considerably less sexy than these pictures would imply. But who am I to judge? I'd just go for the cranberry/army, amirite?
a herd of street-crossing pubgoers: anywhere else in this city stepping off the sidewalk is guaranteed to get you mowed down like a blade of uppity grass, but in my neighbourhood? The drunks rule with sloppy iron fists.
a guy in a floppy Guinness hat, also drunk: I flipped him the bird because Guinness fucking sucks;
a girl in a plastic green hat on her way out of the house (she bought this thing? she kept it all year and busted it out now? she's not going to keep it in her bag till she gets a few pints in her?);
a staggeringly drunk girl in white cargo pants and a cut-off green linebacker top, toddling down the street with some guy, plastered while still in broad daylight. They stopped for a long moment on the street corner as we were turning into our place, and I had to say to Owen, "Keep your eyes on the road, I promise I'll tell you if she pukes."

In conclusion, everyone is drunk. High five, Calgary.

So, in news more relevant to the internet, I'm halfway through Watchmen and I just watched Brideshead Revisited, which tore my heart out and ripped it up and now my pulse-pounding lust for Matthew Goode as a various assortment of canon-gay or canon-willing-to-fake-gay-if-necessary characters ( is busting up my uterus something awful. )

Current Location: cowtown
Current Music: nagging

I've deleted three half-started journal entries in the last ten minutes. I'm not even going to list what they were about, because I am apparently so foul and negative I irritate myself right now. Seriously: winter and school, you need to be really really done now.

Instead, I'm going to do this, and if you felt like joining me, I'd be super happy to hear about good things about your Monday/March/life situation. Note: you get bonus points if you manage to slip in various complaints while appearing to be making a positive statement. It's a freaking life skill, yo.

Great and Awesome Things About Today : a 5 Part List that doesn't include food, shelter, safety, lack of intellectual oppression, or the fact that I'm a privileged citizen of a first world country who absolutely takes for granted her internet access

I just downloaded like, 6 new albums (the two sexiest were from kickthebeat, bless her heart) and a bunch of the Planet Money podcasts that I need to catch up on so that I can feel better about owning zero assets that could be depreciated by global economic meltdown.
I'm not working today, which means I spent the first three hours of the morning in my bathrobe. I went back to bed, twice. I could do so again if need be.
My internet lecture was cancelled, so now I just have to watch vague and outdated youtube videos on enterprise content management systems instead and read some boring-ass pdfs.
Brooke linked me to two of the most ridiculous AUs I have ever had the pleasure of hearing of: also, apparently they have mediocre execution, which is my favourite kind of story because then I get to feel good about myself while also enjoying other people's mindgrapes.
If things get really bad, I'm going to brave the -24C/-11F + windchill weather for a bag of fucking ketchup chips (or alternately dill, if I decide I need the room temperature Old Dutch white dip to go with it).

That's better. I still want to spend the next month playing the Sims and reading Anne Rice, but at least in the future I'll be able to look back and appreciate my current half-hermitage with due awe at my time wasting abilities, and also self-recrimination for NOT spending the entire month playing the Sims and reading Anne Rice. Because if not now, in this final stretch of academia, THEN WHEN?

Current Location: cowtown
Current Music: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Afraid Ain't Me | Powered by Last.fm

Isn't it lolarious that the last time I posted was the last day before I started working? Almost three weeks! Back when my schedule was neatly balanced between internet skool and cleaning the fucking coffee pot? Now my time is all: ooOOOOoo, new girl, catalogue this cdn YA novel about a 12 year old escaping from Bountiful "Polygamist Colony" BC in the back of a mini-cooper! And: raging against the sexist jerks who are unfortunately in charge of playing the only half-decent music on the radio in this city while goddamn commuting by car. They play way too much Nirvana, anyway. I hate driving even more than I did back in the mountains.

But life should be clearing up a bit after this weekend. School will slow down a bit and I'll be back up living in the sacrosanct beltline where I can eat Tubby Dog (I do love veggie-weiner!) for lunch every day if need be.

And soon

delighter will be back in town and I'll feel less bored by my repulsively frightening job, where I'm the youngest person there by thirty years and all they talk about is birdwatching (my favourite option, actually), octo-mom, recent deadly car crashes, professional development and retirement and retirement. And retirement. They never talk about their bad jeans, though. It never seems to cross their hive mind: fleece is to work as yoga pants are to the shopping mall. And you know what else? I found a copy of the departmental emergency list today and googlemapped a whole bunch of their houses and the only person who doesn't live in an outlying subdivision in the far Northwest/Southwest of the city is the woman who's retiring tomorrow to sail to New Zealand on her sailboat. She lives in a cute condo complex two blocks away from me and wears practical heels and those whatchamacallit short-sleeved large-buttoned shawl-jacket things. She has weird eyeglasses. Goodbye, my work soulmate, I miss you already.

Current Location: the deep south

On my last day of freedom before I descend into PT work/FT school/4ever bigbang madness, I:

cleaned the coffee maker by making 12 steaming hot cups of 1 part vinegar/2 parts water, then two more pots of just water, then giving her a heavy wipedown;
got one of those free bang trims that my fancy hairstylist is obligated to give me (thanks to delighter's coworker for her thirdhand lesson in tipping etiquette on that front, even though it was still extremely awkward as I didn't want to hand her the money right there and she wouldn't stop making conversation!);
cut up 25 boardgames worth of green pieces labeled "Sleeping on Saturday" "Sleeping on Wednesday" "Sleeping on Friday" &etc.;
wrote my commentary for my mgmt/feminism class;
caught up on my I Blame the Patriarchy feed;
caught up on most of my feeds;
made delicious celery/garlic/spinach/walnut/raisin quinoa for dinner/lunch tomorrow;
made cottage cheese and cashews for immediate eating;
ate a lot of handfuls of things I found, like smarties and a frostburned orange popsicle,
refilled all of the glass jars that are supposed to hold various sundry, but still result in plastic baggies of popcorn kernels, brown sugar and stevia floating around in my cupboards,
fought off the douchebag in #7 in order to do four loads of laundry at 8am;
tried and failed to book a blood donation appointment;
watched Iron Jawed Angels and wept tears for feminism and its shitty title;
watched my week 5 Records Management lecture (the topic was apparently 'where Iron Mountain might not want to put their buildings: bottoms of hills, flood plains, places with vermin, near fire');
went to American Apparel;
bought Owen Valentine's Day gifts;
maybe in that order;
probably I will post pictures later;
Brooke, I found us some shorts;
oh, and posted in my blog, and linked to this kindofabigdeal blog I love and read regularly, and dude followed my trackback and commented to me, AND I AM SO MORTIFIED I CANNOT EVEN TELL YOU, BLOG ETIQUETTE IS SO FOREIGN COMPARED TO SAFE, LOVELY LJ;
I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH;
I also watered my four plants.

In conclusion, what the fuck am I going to do when I don't have time on my hands anymore? A picture post of my massive amounts of accomplishment (mostly food what I has made, then ate) is forthcoming, because I have been religiously documenting my spare time in an effort to quantify my activities in non deadline terms, which is hard.

Current Location: cowtown

My dad just signed off a ten-word email with old one hand. As in:

good to know.

surgery went well.

old one hand

It's kind of like I'm receiving coded riddle emails from my maimed arch-nemesis, a rogue privateering sea captain confirming the date of our french polynesian rendezvous, where he'll hand over my captured ward (a stubborn teenage boy in a ruffled collar from a good family) who he's recently performed some kind of high-seas butchery on with a hacksaw and a bottle of rum, because an encounter with the British fleet - my own ship, mayhaps? - put a cannonball through my ward's foot, and when I see him the boy will be pale but stoic and Old One Hand will threaten to walk him off the plank until I commit some act of derring-do, and it is revealed that my arch-nemesis has always been my estranged father, and by our own similarities in the midst of an action sequence we will be reconciled.

Fortunately, I know my dad was not getting a hand amputated. So. Crisis averted. I will not be joining the navy any time soon.

'Tis the season of awkward gifts and tokens from people you don't like well enough to have got gifts for yourself. In this case: bag of chocolate, and a silkscreened print. :/ One more reason to work people up so I can blacklist Christmas entirely next year. The secret is to have a social circle so small or held at perfect arms-length, so they'd never think of you, either, and then tell the people you actually care about that you refuse to buy into the megatheocorporatocracy. I WILL GET THERE. I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL.

Current Music: Woodpigeon - Chorus Of Wolves | Powered by Last.fm

So, a girl in my program just sent an announcement over the departmental listserv, entitled "December NaNoWriMo" which - and let me tell you how my heart started racing in that confluence-of-two-separate-and-distinct-social-spheres kind of way - said the following:

I was incredible [sic] saddened by the fact I was unable to participate this year due to an overwhelming work-load [bitch bitch bitch] and the corresponding social commitments [brag brag brag], so I've decided to cheat and do NaNoWriMo in December. Any of you who want to join me in the revelry are welcome and encouraged.

It took me approximately two minutes to Google her full name, plus my school's name, find a dormant bravejournal account, transfer her username to livejournal, and find her recently-updated and terrifyingly un-flocked journal.

FYI, she talks about her diet and the Anita Blake series. :/

EDIT: and her fanfic.net account. WHAT. WHAT.

NO. NO ADMITTING FANDOM INTERESTS IN PUBLIC PLACES, DUMBASS. WHY ARE YOU ASKING FOR MOCKERY.

In other news, saying goodbye to acquaintances and ~~lying~~ promising to come back for convocation in May has made me even more smug about leaving. SMUG SMUG SMUG GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE.

Current Location: the 26th floor
Current Music: Woodpigeon - Oberkampf | Powered by Last.fm

I pulled a tragic, toe-scufflingly remorseful resignation at work this week. NAMELY BECAUSE I'M LEAVING IN 15 DAYS, 11 HOURS, YESSSSSSSSSSS. But on one level, I guess I could say it's kind of sad: I'm kind of getting used to spending 15 hours/week scanning archival documents from Halifax's House of Assembly in the 1810s, and listening to much of the following:

a) This American Life, aka Ira Glass' adorable lisp (sometimes he doles out relationship advice!);

b) CBC Radio 3, podcasts or just plain radio or sometimes just a random fishing of New Music Canada's billions of sexy Cdn artist pages;

c) podfic (even though I have to skip through the sex because dudes! I AM AT WORK!);

d) the New Yorker's terribly fucking hip Fiction Podcast that makes me want to simultaneously forget about writing real fiction ever and also delete my lj entirely because I am just that ambivalent;

e) my own excellent taste in music, which you should all definitely friend on last.fm so that I can be further shamed out of listening to Placebo ever again;

and;

f) the occasional mortgage advice podcast, because I am obviously living in a fantasy world where crippling student debt doesn't exist and me and my future pound dog will live in idyllic bliss in my fantasy 2-bed, 2-bath, fenced-yard character home within walking distance of the LRT, the Central Library and probably the homeless shelter, too, by virtue of geographic reality.

However, I have two weeks of full-time work left to fill with distractatory talkin and/or tunez, so if anyone has any recs for favourite radio stations, podcasts, music sources, AND YES, THE BEST PODFIC, do tell.

Current Location: the 26th floor
Current Music: Corb Lund - Student Visas | Powered by Last.fm

Today's ~~Accomplishments

purchased two long-distance grad school courses from two different well-known Canadian universities, on credit. At $1200 apiece. UGH.
watched the first episode of True Blood: porny and kind of unfortunately Smeyerlike, but I'll giver a shot. Mostly because I reeeeeeeally liked it when Bill said, "May I call upon you?" TEEE FUCKING HEE.
muttered to myself in the elevator about the guy who got off one floor down being an asshole (he was one of those door-close button punchers! THE DOORS WILL CLOSE ON THEIR OWN, FUCKWAD, DON'T PRETEND LIKE YOU HAVE SOME SORT OF EXTRA POWER OVER IT) and I totally got caught by the singular attractive dude who lives on my floor. Like, reddish-blonde hair and blue eyes and looks a lot like Owen Pallett and until today I had plans to deduce his musical taste via trick questions in the elevator and/or laundry room and/or garbage chute room. But now he thinks I'm a crazy knob who wanders around hissing "asshole" under her breath. Which, I guess, would be true. :|
finished that spatial data infrastructure analysis with an idealistic flourish towards open access for georeferenced data and user participation and the good of Albertan society, etc. etc. I couldn't even convince myself. But I suspect the prof has an undiagnosed learning disability and probably won't read it. WHAT. I SAID IT.
listened to a podcast reading by the dude who won this year's Giller prize (which is worth $50k, which I did not know, oh lord). He read his lovingly detailed attempted-rape-and-predictable-rescue scene. I was not fucking impressed by the choice. Seriously, Margaret Atwood? As the resident man-hating judge (according to my ex-hair stylist) aren't you supposed to be here to protect us from that crap?
crossed my fingers for delighter on her epic trip elsewhere, and her hopefully porn-filled plane ride.
crossed my fingers for fortuna_major WHO IS COMING HERE AT 7AM TOMORROW, 4 SRS.
AND, AN EXTRA BONUS ACTIVITY: I also read Michael Chabon's opinions on fan fiction (of the Sherlock Holmes variety, which he wrote and published and got paid for) and the soul-killing nature of the "contemporary, quotidian, plotless moment-of-truth revelatory story" that I have been agonizing over all month. Thank you, Michael Chabon, for making me want to write nurse romances for the rest of my life.

Current Music: holy fuck // lovely allen

So Stars was sold out tonight, and lucky me, the entire church was packed with teenagers. Yet I still managed to take a prime seat at the front, despite pissing off the girl who was forced via east coast heartiness to scooch her fine ass over. And while I definitely made it through Hey Rosetta's sloppy but enthusiastic cellos, I cannot get over the fact that I am just not that into Stars.

I made it through maybe five songs before I just gave up and left? That Torquil guy is a fucking tool, ladies. He's just. He practically fell off the stage as soon as they got on, and was all falling into the front row's underage arms, AND THEY THREW FAKE ROSES INTO THE CROWD and Amy Millan is arguably the frumpiest rock star ever, yes? When she pulled out her flute I promised myself I could go at the end of the song. Eeeeegh. Why so old, Stars? Gen X, no one's into you anymore. Go hang with Coupland and his apocalypse fantasies or smthg.

ANYWAY. Four concerts down, I've officially maxed out my low level indie cred with three different colours of stocking from superstore, so. We can all move on now and I swear I'm not going to anything by myself again for a fucking year.

On the non-antisocial side, last night me and the granny gang went to see King Lear. As a ballet. Set to Shostakovich. It was genuinely moving in parts, but I won't lie: I was there for the tight shirts and the no shirts and the sweating and leaping around the stage in rly rly tight pants.

But you know what probably the best part of my weekend overall was? That R.Pattz boy. Thanks for being there for me, kid. You and your waxy moustachios.

Current Music: Stars - Take Me To the Riot | Powered by Last.fm

Yeah, my lameness is pretty much spiraling out of control lately. Like, obviously I don't tell people that I write stories about canpop indie legends like Final Fantasy banging dudes who aren't his boyfriend, and filming highbrow music video porn with other Toronto indier-than-thou non-entities. I find that not telling my acquaintanceship about my deviancy makes them more likely to attend concerts with me. I have to mask my massive boner with my math notebook, of course, but, like. I'd rather not have to explain slash in its entirety to my librarian granny gang.

( are they still my gang? it's up for debate. )

PS. I've given up on fandom for the next month or so. There will be no fic. Not that there's been relevant fic here for a while. But. Just fyi. I'm not about to stop making navel-gazing posts about my ~~feelings, either, so if I'm still on your reading filter at this point, you may as well give up and just defriend. Fortunately, I hold very few illusions about my interestingness to the vast majority of humankind, and I'll only cry for a little while.

Current Location: the 26th floor
Current Music: Meligrove Band - Our Love Will Make The World Go Round | Powered by Last.fm

Tipping port-a-potties over: pretty funny, right? Like, scale of 1 to 10: maybe a 5 or 6. It's pretty random dumbassery, anyway. It just loses points because a) it's smelly when it's right in front of your house and b) some poor dude has to clean it up the next morning.

So unfortunately, me yelling "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?" at the four immaculately dressed indie-cool stoner kids who tipped over the honeypot in the middle of the street construction in front of my house last night was kind of a harsh on their buzz. Oh, they fucking ran down the street, the little jerks. Straight out of sight, limbs gangling. Even when the other guy who watched them do it called to them to stop and clean it up (optimist that he is), they just kept running.

And yeah, I gave them a head start. Probably a good ten minutes as me and my dad examined the damage and the little river of poo leaking out.

But then I put my similarly-aged sister in the car and caught up with them. And she recognized them, knew a few of their names. Specifically, that one little hottie who'd been making sympathetic noises to the tall blonde kid that had been swearing up a shitstorm over his cracked fingernail in the street. The very bitching, in fact, that called me out onto the patio to watch them rock the shithouse down. "Don't fucking touch it, fuck!" he'd snarled at her. And she'd backed off, chastised, but still patient for her chance to get in his pants.

So as I buzzed by them in my car a second time, I gave them the shark eye and the bird and then went home and called the girl's father, who happens to be last year's winner of Canmore Idol, and a mural painter in town. His response: "Ah, shit."

I like to imagine that I have single-handedly alerted this man to his daughter's wayfaring habits, and perhaps rekindled a latent bond between them that will prevent her from continuing to hang out with such bitchy little destructive momma's boys, and perhaps keep her self-respect intact for a few more years.

Regardless, who is the cold hand of vengeance in this town? I AM. THAT'S RIGHT. GIVE ME A BADGE OR SOMETHING.

Although, I'm still waiting to get the little twelve year old shits down the street who threw snowballs at my car and then ran right back into their own house afterwards. I have an eye out for you suckers. O.O

Current Location: canmordor
Current Music: construction workers bemoaning their turtle's heads

A list, entitled:

shit I have not been doing because I have been fucking eaten alive by this Shia!Pepper/Tony sequel (sequel, wtf is wrong with me) that will be done soonish, like, this weekish

applying for student loans;
reading my library books;
checking my flist (SHAME, I am an asshat, yes);
reassuring the cowtown posse that yes, I am alive, so that they don't freaking show up in the mountains on a friday evening and take me out to a stupidly expensive retaurant where Owen gets the shark eye for his batman t-shirt and Brooke runs into women going through idk, valium withdrawal on the floor of the powder-room, or something - as well as them making me choose the wine from the WINE MENU, then going to the depot for some more wine, getting drunk, and then picking a fight with some eco-vigilante mountain-BMXers up on the cliffs re: the heineken cans that weren't ours anyways, so don't get your spandex in a knot, bitches;
finding a way to rescue my old PC emails from my transferred harddrive's Thunderbird files onto my pretty little macbook, so old correspondence is down for the friggin count;
building a website for the student assoc;
figuring out how the fuck to build a website, UGH;
eating properly, as in, not powerbars;
maintaining civil relations with the folks/landlords;
developing my awkward fantasies about my boss to obscene new levels;
catching up on bsg/spn/a million other shows I should watch;
etc. etc. etc.

A second list, entitled:

Shit that did get done, regardless

RECLAIMING/RESCUING Messr. Le Skeleton (see: rubber skull stolen from me on hallowe'en night seven years ago, now defaced with a sharpied moustachio) from the shithead across the street - he had it WIRED to his CAR and my sister and I brought out the fucking boltcutters in the late-night-dark, YESSIR;
The Incredible Hulk: Edward Norton in Bella Coola, BC (seriously Marvel, what is up with you and Western Canada? Wolverine in the wilds of Alberta nearly SLEW me) and Tony Stark shows up to "recruit" him to the Avengers. COME ON, INTERNET. PLAY NICE FOR MOMMA.

sorry kids, I didn't realize it had been this long. I am a fickle thing.

Current Location: cowtown
Current Music: tegan & sara // downtown

I picked up a hitchhiker on my commute home today. What could I do: I thought he was a really ugly girl at first, and he had a guitar on his back and his signage was VERY CLEAR, which I appreciated. His name was Elegwen, and on the internet he claims to be a) in a band and b) a fairy. Seriously:

Each one of the band members were left at the doorstep of poor village people by the faeries. Over the years they have eventually crossed each others paths and played music lost in the memories and dreams from the time they were unborn in the faerie land of Tír na nÓg.

And now I have a sticker from his canadian-irish gaelic fairy band that reads Folk is fucking deadly.

They played at Calgary's Lilac Festival, apparently (who believes what people tell you IRL? there are freaking psychos out there, like the guy at Beirut who told me he was a character animator for Disney and that he draws a lot of dinosaurs, guys riding dinosaurs, and guys shooting dinosaurs while riding other dinosaurs. LYING. OBVS. Nonetheless, I told him to look into a career in Drumheller.)

( god, paige, stop spamming us with your lameo youtube videos that even you haven't watched )

Anyway, I didn't get raped, and now I have time to write part V. The end.

Current Location: canmordor

Friends and lovers, I cannot even explain the past week. I am a leaf blown on the winds of fortune. I have been abused, and I have been thankful.

My computer is fried, like, done. Half an hour after I posted Part IV, it just... stopped. I do not know when it will be fixed, or if it will - an ingenious argument for not going back to school next year, I think. And then I flew to Vancouver, and dropped my bag on my own face on the plane, and couldn't work the elevator in the hotel, and tried to walk into someone else's hotel room. And then I spent a million interminable hours at this library conference - which, yeah. Who's propagating that library-chic hipness myth? And can you please fuck yourself? And I was blown off by my boss at the trade show, and my professional partner at the mixer, and about eight hundred different professionals who got roped into networking with me by the other professionals as they smoothly blew me off. Although the ninety year old Professor Emeritus from Dal bought me a 7$ beer, saintly old guybrarian he is. And I saw Iron Man again. And then I was really early to the airport for my plane, which was late. And then when I finally arrived in Calgary, to smooch my partner and receive his thousand hugs, he was beside himself, teary-eyed because he's a motherfucking moron who locked his keys in the car and left it running in the parkade. So we waited for a million interminable hours for AMA to come and break into our car and I didn't cry or yell because I would take a thousand times as much inconvenience and bad luck for another trip like this one. Because karma fucking PULLED IT TOGETHER for me:

( I was ten feet away from Zach Condon, and yeah he flips his hair like a girl )

LIFE = OVER.

Except for Shia LaBeouf's comb and switchblade combo, which I will attend to on Tuesday. Where is my pitchforkslash where Zach's show in LA is a gongshow because some drunken starlet shows up with his Echo Park posse and frightens the hipsters and then there is mad lovin? WHERE?

Current Location: canmordor
Current Music: beirut // brandenburg