Randominium

Distractions

corrosiveMy memory foam pillow has amnesia.

Why don’t the advertisers of paper towels use cat barf as their “blue liquid” example? I’d buy that product if they showed that none of the kitty bile seeped through.

Why do I forget myself when wearing headphones and fart like a sailor? Usually when walking down the street with someone right behind me?

When you’re the most angry and trying to make a point, you will create a cute snot bubble over your nostril.

When you are the sickest, that is when video store clerks insist on talking to you.

You are the most vulnerable to winding up on YouTube while singing, picking or ranting like a rehab celebrity (or all three at once).

Certificates are really nothing but pieces of paper saying you’ve experienced pain, loss or boredom.

Early adopters inevitably will be seen as dorks. And inevitably that contempt will be forgotten when the product becomes mainstay.

Risk management is an oxymoron.

Koalas wouldn’t be perceived as “cute” if they had access to machetes.

Health food stores usually aren’t.

I’m frightened to touch most of the stuff way behind in the back of our under the sink counter. I fear that crap will melt my hand EXACTLY like those 70s warning labels.

Lost In Translation

Distractions, England

Checking my stats, someone translated one of my England posts to “Chinese” (according to Google, no mention which dialect). I like this style of writing better, actually:

It is Sunday morning. Nagel’s give me a croissant, so we can read newspapers.

Nagel years older than I. 12. He is in a relationship with Peter near 8 years. Peter’s every Sunday into the office and then towards the club, ignoring Nagel trouble. I was “trouble.”

I met Nagel, when standing in a bar cloning region, away from the Earls Court subway station at the time step. He is a drunken white skin and blond and handsome royal. He also has an ear adhesion 90 degrees from his head. It is lovely. I simply wrote about our relationship here before.

Open the door of the house. Peter’s unexpected return. “Is a sedative,” Nagel said of paper from his search. Peter went into the kitchen and the investigation two of us. I will work together to introduce their own, but Peter clapped his hands and said “right!” Bit too loudly. Moment of him, and we could hear him in the bedroom near the search. Ringing the front door.

And we continue to have huge, naughty, and Nagel and I.

England Pre-Memory – Punch In The Gut

Art, England, Personal Bits

Like George Lucas I’m going to jump back to a time before my move to England with a couple stories that inspired me to travel across the pond. Enjoy!

I’m 18 years old and I’m sitting in line with other hopefuls at OCAD (then The Ontario College of Art). I’ve not decided entirely what I want to do with my life and my father is getting nervous that he’s going to have a live-in son until he shuffles off this mortal coil. I do know I want to stay in the art field but I had not decided exactly where I was going to take my talents. My portfolio, chock full of wildly coloured pastels of muscular torsos I had been drawing for months, sits on my bouncing knee. Compared to the rest of the hopefuls, my manner of dress is utterly “Sears” to their “Queen Street West”: one small girl is decked out entirely in leather in her shock Rough Trade look, her hair teased higher than my hopes. This is 1983, remember. I’m there to sign up for their Fine Arts program and let that take me wherever I wanted to go.

I enter the room and here is where my memory shatters up to a point: The room is narrow, almost another hallway. It’s dark, or I sort of recall that it was dark. There are three people at a desk and two look through my portfolio. I was so nervous that I didn’t catch who everyone behind that desk was. Only now, in my 40s, someone told me that one of the people looking at my work was a student and I assume the one not looking at my portfolio was a teacher or admissions officer. I do remember they asked all the questions.

What were my interests, favorite art period, method, incentives, history, my personal history, more personal history? Suddenly it was over. Fast. They breezed through my work and shut the portfolio. Not a good sign.

Then one of them laid it on the line (and I’m paraphrasing here): I was a privileged middle class white kid who had not experienced anything in life, certainly not enough to create any kind of meaningful art and that I should get out of Ontario and see real art. It was like a punch in the gut. The fact that I was living in my Dad’s basement and working nights at a hotel and had never travelled further than , made the OCAD’s assessment of me sting a little more.

They were right. If I wanted to be a serious artist I had to go see the real thing. Including all life’s little roadbumps that came up getting to those galleries. Of course, for weeks I was utterly crushed and moped around like my life was over.

Then my sister called. She asked how I was and offered words of encouragement and then suggested that I move to England under the Student Work Abroad Program. I can remember vividly how a light came on over my head. This is exactly what I needed to do.

Disasters

Celebs and Media

Anyone catch Dancing With The Stars last night?

I thought not.

I stuck it out until Woz got up there and fumbled around the stage like the Star Wars Kid at the prom. Get me, people: I love and respect everything Woz does no matter how geeked out he may look (did I not call it when I said he’d show up on a Segway?) but last night was just embarrassing. His drug testing joke after the judges lambasted him fell flatter than reality through a black hole. Poor guy.

In fact the whole show seemed a bit awkward. Like your Dad skinny dipping at a drunken BBQ at the cottage. Or your next door neighbour to your cottage hitting your Dad’s naked ass with a spotlight as he frolicks around the water. Or watching your Mom neck with someone other than your Dad as he lowers his naked self into the cold lake. Or Parental Shrinkage.

You get my drift. It wasn’t good TV. You could see who was going to win, who was going to get booted and who was going to faint.

At least Amazing Race is doing quite well this season. More scenery, less airport and a clever deaf guy.

Life Imitates The Simpsons And Isn’t All That Funny

You Stupid Dick

Okay, whoever owns 416 000 9946 (and all other 000 prefix exchanges) needs to sit on a machete without lube and drag their ass around their living room carpet like a dog with worms. These annoying telemarketers are almost Simpsonesque in it’s execution, but no where near as funny: phone rings and there’s either a really long pause then hang up, because the idiots operating the autodialer have the brains the size of pine nuts, or the uninteresting recording rambles on about crap I don’t need.

Yes, I’ve stopped answering it, since it’s tagged to my cell phone (hmmm, Rogers, I wonder how they got that number since I’ve only ever given that out to family) and that shit eventually costs money. And before you suggest it, the Canadian Do Not Call list is managed by ear puss leaking drooling fucktards who managed to sell the list to scammers, spammers and dicks.

Here’s one for free, Rogers (or any other telecommunications company): since you care so much to filter spam on the internet, why not man up and offer a block on all xxx-000-xxxx number, for free! You’ll have people flock to your service, I betcha!

Deception as Motivation

Personal Bits

For the last couple months I’ve been putting off my promise to myself for losing 20lbs. I had been weighing myself religiously with every visit to the gym and had not noticed any great flux in my weight – it was hovering nicely around 225lbs, but 20lbs sounded so easy to do: no chips, no eating after 8pm, more salads, less sugar, bla bla bla, which made me complacent to actually doing something about it. I was making promises to myself that I’d lose it before Disney and what the hey, I had a few months to go so what’s the rush?

Last week I was standing nude waiting in line for the scale in the change room (I love walking around nude in there, no towel wrap. Freaks out the repressed Islamic/Catholics), when the guy on the scale steps off and blurts: “Finally! They fixed it!”

Huh?

I step on.

It’s one of those doctor office ones with the sliding weights. I snap the weights to 225. Nope. Too light.

227? Nope.

235? No, the weights stayed put, not enough.

242? Finally the weights balance. Oh fucking shit on a toasted English muffin with a side of fucking home fries. With ass hollandaise sauce.

I felt cheated. I felt angry. I felt like some Fat Ass Fairy came and blessed me in the night with a gift of fat. I wanted to stride naked out of the change room to the administration office of the gym and wave my blubber at them while shouting: “YOU DID THIS TO ME!!” To say this was a wake up call was a bit of an understatement. I was nearing 1/8th of a ton.

I have friends who went on various Jenny Craig/Weight Watchers programs and while I honestly commended them for their choice of healthy eating (they all looked amazing after their run), when they talked about their food intake for the day like their relationship with food resembled a troubled loved one going through rehab, I would silently thank my lucky stars I wasn’t a “food Nazi”.

These things are cyclic: I have become a Food Nazi. So I’m eating more salads, less sugars, nothing after 8pm and getting back to the gym to do an hour of cardio for each visit. This is the last I’ll speak of it, though.