Skipped air-guitar class today... feeling all pent-up silly as a result

It tickles me pink whenever I read a reviewer say something like, "this was the [best/worst/longest/etc.] book to cross my desk all year!" Get it? Little book with legs? Waiting for the light to turn green so he can cross the desk? Dum-dee-dum, don't mind me?

I have decided that I would like to have a job which requires that things regularly cross my desk, and that I say so in the newspaper. I picture sitting smugly at some top-floor office-building bureau, in a wing-tipped chair, stroking a very magisterial lap-cat who condescends to open one eye when my assistants knock shyly at the door. The only thing to "cross my desk" these days is Tycho, who always aborts his crossing right in the middle because he decides that the computer keyboard is a good place to park his sizeable hind quarters and begin a thorough grooming, starting with the butt area. That's not good for anybody to see, least of all the A to L keys on my keyboard, and some of the punctuation keys as well, which get the brunt of the - er - brunt whenever T squashes down on my computer.

OH NO HERE HE COMES!!!

ASSDFHJFGDHLKJH;FGDLHKKL;,.,;K.,JHKJFGLHKJFGLKHJDFLKG,F;'HJ,.GH;'.'..;,L;

Clean butts all around.


!!!1!!!!!!

Because I cannot add numbers together, AND I cannot use the cut/paste Word function properly, I just discovered that I have 30 pages less of my thesis written than I thought I did. You'd think this would prompt me to write BETTER FASTER LONGER, but instead it prompted me to cook a lasagna from scratch. And somehow I feel better.....


BECAUSE IT'S NOT A REAL BLOG IF THERE ISN'T A CAT:
I keep having elaborate dreams about losing Tycho. I blame this news story, which pulverizes my tender little heart like the raw organ that it is and tosses it to hungry wolves. In "real" life (it's all relative) I don't often have to take T outside of the apartment, but when I do, it takes EVERY OUNCE OF WILLPOWER to resist opening his cage door on the metro just to see if my wittle fuzzy-wuzzy kitten-mitten cutie pie is all right in there. If he ever escaped from his cage he would be a little orange dustcloud, like the Tazmanian Devil, leaving a trail of destruction on on his way to freedom. In my dreams I am always somewhere worrisome, like a war zone, or maybe in the shadow of a tsunami wave, or outside of a huge, burning building. Sometimes D is there, being all "you can't go back into that burning building! It's going to collapse any second!", which dream-Megan interprets as "The building's about to collapse! Move faster! Dive under that smoldering pile of lumber and LOOK FOR THE CAT! QUICKLY!!!!" Very stressful nights, these.

Usually I wake up and T is sitting next to my shoulder, staring at me, making those chirpy throat noises because it's 3am and that's feeding time right? And usually when he sees that my eyes are open his pupils swell to paranormal size and he pounces on my face. Logical reaction, apparently, if you're a Tycho. I try to trump my feelings of pain and discomfort at such moments with my feelings of relief that he is not actually about to suffer some terrible dream-fate, but that doesn't always work...which is why I move his bed into the bathroom at night. That's the only door in the apartment that closes firmly enough to contain him.

Buddy!

Other news: to turn completely unselfish motives into a self-PR pitch, listen to this! I AM FRIENDS WITH A SUPERHERO! Doesn't that suit me? She might even wear a cape if I ask her to.

BEDTIME PHOTO (in more ways than one?):

Try as I might, I can't quite explain this picture. Worth 1,000 words, right?

-- Off to tempt fate with a little more lasagna in my belly

Because there will always be more

Miracle of miracles, I've actually managed to get a whole lotta reading done over the past reading week! I am still committed to my goal of devouring my library, and the gears are huffing at full speed. Technically, it's not really a goal, since there's no deadline or M.O.... and I keep making false progress by re-reading certain books, instead of turning to new ones. You know how that goes... some environmental or emotional trigger inexplicably drives you to a certain novel or collection that has kept you company in the past.

The weather seems to be a trigger for me, when it comes to old, familiar books. On late-winter days when the wind is cool but has soft edges, and the sidewalks are dry, and people are flapping their bathroom mats against the railing of their stoops to get all the bits of kitty litter out, I always crave The Way I Found Her, by Rose Tremain. It reminds me of Paris, even though I read it long before going there. I borrowed it from my Aunt Mary, who keeps a wonderfully loose and shaggy library of incredible books, squeezed onto a few shelves in the narrow hallway of her Toronto apartment. It seems to me that I used to be in that apartment often, and I read that novel lying on her couch with her cat Daisy watching me warily from another chair. I know that I was fourteen and felt like momentous things were going in my life (I was partially right), and that it was spring, which explains the weather connection.

A few months ago I found a copy of it for sale at a used bookstore downtown, but then I had one of my "responsible spending" attacks and put it back on the shelf. About twenty seconds later the bookstore went out of business. I guess I could just order a copy, but that's not the point - the craving is almost better than the book itself.

I'd already read Housekeeping and Mean Boy when I picked them off my shelf this week, but I re-read them anyway. I had a lot less patience for Housekeeping this time around, but re-reading Mean Boy was illuminating - it's about a league of creative writing students and the self-important English faculty members who alternately teach, coddle, and neglect them. Since reading it three years ago, mostly while lying in the grass on UC hill at Western with the very eyes of the English faculty staring down at me from the tower, my frame of reference for who those characters are has completely changed. I guess personal experience really does colour the way you receive other people's fictions! Who knew?

Other news:
Thanks to Ingrid, I now have good reason to toss out all of my "flimsy excuses" and just go ahead and get a dog. Or maybe two of them?

I'm thinking that maybe, when cardio is over .... action-figure yoga?

And lastly... ever since Viv snapped it 24 hours ago, this picture has been making me laugh out loud (LOL, guys!):

I don't even know what chris & I were looking at. An empty wine bottle maybe?

--Off to restock the cabinet

It's better on top

So if you were a middle-aged, washed-up wannabe-rich-guy, walking through a cornfield in the moonlight trying to find an old woman with a failing mind who has wandered away from home, and you come across a couple of hooligans who are trying to burn down the abandoned farmhouse that you were hoping to sell to a bunch of urban investors looking for a hunting lodge, what would you do?

That's the question I have been trying to answer all afternoon, sitting here at my desk while Tycho makes wheezy noises in the armchair and my thesis deadline prances closer with every wasted minute.

Guys? It turns out that writing is HARD.

It's at least as hard as scrambling through fifty feet of snow to get to the top of Mt. Royal which, like writing, requires a stuck-out tongue if any kind of progress is going to be made (look closely):

Had Jen, Mark, and Maggie here for the weekend, and when we weren't eating, laughing, or doing acrobatics on my bed (NOT WHAT YOU THINK), we were taking turns being human toboggans, which is what necessitated our wilderness climb on the mountain. Why Maggie is awesome, in a nutshell:

Jen: Oh no. Three girls and a Mark. One small toboggan.
Megan: Does not compute!!!
Mark: We will have to take turns.
Meanwhile, Maggie has already climbed on, and is gesturing for us to quit our unnecessary hen-pecking and just get the heck on board. So we did! Minus Mark, who stayed behind as the generous pusher-offer and picture-taker.

The Before shot:
And, inevitably, the After:

As if having Maggie around to entertain us wasn't enough, we got tickets to go see a taping of the CBC comedy show The Debaters, which was gut-bustingly hilarious. Listen to CBC this Saturday at 6:30pm and you'll hear the four of us trying to make as many unique laughing noises as we can in order to be distinguishable on the radio.


As is usual for me, the experience of being "close" to CBC was thrilling. We got there early enough to get a table at the front of the bar, snug against the stage, and who should be sitting right next to me, holding up signs for Debaters host Steve Patterson to interpret as he ran the show, but Dagmar Kaffanke-Nunn!!! If that means something to you then please let me hug you - we belong together. I guess it's mostly nostalgia, but I get this nerdy little spine-tingle whenever I spy the CBC Montreal tower on my way downtown. Maybe one day I'll be able to tell them that during a job interview! "You guys make me feel all warm and fuzzy! Please, please, pleeeeease hire me!" Groveling always works for situations like that, right?

As for Mix-master T, he is glad to have the apartment to himself again. When there are too many people around he develops this worried look on his face, like he's afraid that someone might leave with his favourite sleepin' chair, or that we might forget to constantly pet him and goo over his cuteness. He's also the kind of guy who hates having his busy routine disrupted. Luckily order has been restored, and he can get right back on schedule:


-- Off to kindle some flames

CAN'T SLEEP CLOWNS WILL EAT ME

Well, we did it! We, the Sugar Sisters, finally got ourselves together and had the sleepover that we have been discussing since we squinted at each other for the first time across the rim of a beer glass and declared ourselves an official posse. Needless to say, the sleepover consisted of not much sleep, thanks to the Mack truck that delivered five hundred pounds of sugar to Claudine's doorstep at midnight, and also to the endless supply of 70s-and-80s musicals on hand. Ladies, Grease is the word! Especially when you've got an equal amount of grocery-store wine and homemade birthday cake flaming through your bloodstream!!!


The cakes (because there were more than one) were all thanks to Val, who kindly arranged for her birthday to fall almost exactly on the date of our sleepover!

Is that a YAWN that I see? On the right?? Blasphemy! Thou shalt not yawn at a sleepover!!! Admittedly, the yawner is Christina, who, excepting Claudine, is the only one among us with an actual JOB that requires her to be somewhere at some ridiculous hour every weekday morning. Why do people sign up for those things when they could be somewhere like Concordia, where classes are never scheduled before 1pm? One of the myriad ways that the world baffles me.

At the sleepover we tried to be as girlie as possible, with make-up, hair, and pedicure stations set up in Clau's living room, the way we used to have exercise stations set up in the gym in grade school. I even forgot that I wanted to challenge the bravest among us to a Mario Kart rally, because my brain was taken over by the Makeup Fairy (aka Courtney) who insisted that I MUST HAVE SMOKEY EYES THIS MINUTE! SMOKEY EYES FOREVER!!!!

You'll notice from this picture that no amount of makeup expertise on Court's part could undo the wine-teeth damage caused by two hours of imbibing. I am convinced that the only reason anybody ever drinks white wine is that it is the only wine-alternative to looking like a freshly satisfied vampire after glass #2.

Alas, the good times could not last forever. Thank goodness that our dear (but male) friend Jean-Marc didn't actually perform the 3am panty raid he had been threatening, because all he would have found was something like this:


The sleepover happened a couple of weeks ago, and I'm sorry I haven't been updating very regularly since then. I keep hanging out near my bookshelves at home, running my fingers along the spines of the dozens of books that I own but haven't read, whispering empty promises about how I'll be less busy in a week or two and will be able to work my way through their staggering numbers. I think that owning a whole tipsy bookshelf of novels you haven't read yet (without even counting the stack beside your bed, or the pile that's growing exponentially on top of your desk) is a very hopeful act. It means that you keep collecting books and, hence, keep hoping that one day you'll have the sort of life in which you can read all the time, at random, from whichever volume suits your fancy. I keep thinking that that sort of life is arranging itself in my immediate future, and all I have to do is send this one last email, or work this one last afternoon at school, or finish this one last paper. But it never seems to work out that way!

Other news: Visit from the handsome D-dawg last weekend. The only part of the visit I can discuss in a forum frequented by my mom and other adults who think that I am upstanding (sorry, adults) is the part where we went skating, which was incredibly cold and incredibly hot at the same time. Observe the hotness!


Valentines' Day: I spent the first few hours of Feb. 14th wandering a lecture hall, watching for wandering eyes among the students of English 260, who were writing their midterms. Spending two hours watching as students sigh and slouch and doodle little five-pointed stars in the margins of their exam booklets makes you almost hope for a cheater or two, just to spice things up. Jon, the prof I work for, joked about how the least little eye twitch from a student makes all the TAs in the room stand a little straighter and watch a little more closely.

IN A WORLD WHERE EYES WERE MEANT TO LOOK STRAIGHT DOWN AT EXAM PAPERS, ONE STUDENT DARED TO BE DIFFERENT...

I had a movie date with Viv and Jean-Marc on the afternoon of Feb. 14th, which was threatened when I went to the wrong damn movie theatre to meet them, and only realized it after waiting there for fifteen minutes and wondering impatiently why they were both so late. A lot of running and a conveniently-timed metro train got me to the right theatre just in time for the start of STEP UP 2: THE STREETS, which was a hilarious and hilariously bad movie - but I loved it, because I was sitting with two of the best people in Montreal, who were eating cinnamon hearts with me and counting on their fingers the number of clichés spouting onscreen. I have to admit, for Viv's sake, that the dancing in that movie was pretty darn amazing, though they must have spent their entire budget on the choreography because they could obviously only afford a team of drunken monkeys to write the script.

After the movie came my Thursday night ritual: go to Jean-Marc's house, plant my butt on his couch, and watch Lost on his roommate's HD television. Doubtlessly I will blog about the Lost-watching experience at JM's, with a troop of others who are as addicted to Matthew Fox's - er - the show's overall excitement. For now, though, I am at home, waiting for Jen & Mark and their/my friend Maggie to show up from Toronto for a weekend of good times among good friends. I just got a text message from them saying that have crossed in Qc, so they'll be here soon!

HAPPINESS IS....

...invisible guitar at 80's night!