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!