Today I learned that best before dates are guidelines, not law. My milk expired yesterday. With my boyfriend blowing his knees out somewhere in rural Russia while trying to stay sober as he’s practically bathed in vodka, milk consumption has gone from two litres every day to two litres in two weeks (it would have been one week but I also had orange juice, nyum, nyum). And it smelled good and tasted good, so I made pancakes! Hurrah!
I’m still waiting for my new fridge, and making it my goal to use up everything that’s in it so I can clean the old unit out. Yup, the highlight of my life is planning to buy mushrooms so I can use up a nearly full jar of mayo to make chickpea burgers. And making earring trees.
Okay, actually my life has one other highlight, the gawdoful story I’ve been writing. It has torture of an unrealistically attractive male! Gothy over use of spoo0ooky cliches! Romance! More torture of the hero! Basically left alone long enough I start entertaining myself.
I went swimming today for half an hour, blissfuly messing about in the water. I love how I can pretend I’m strong and flexiable, lifting myself up so I’m supported by my arms and lifting my legs, toes pointed, so my knees touch my chin. Yesterday I sawed the counter, and today I got proper exercise, called to make sure I’d get my fridge, and then I built an earring tree out of wire and sequins. And then I did a weekly lot of laundry. One light batch, one dark batch and my bedding.
And then the girl who watches the machines at the laundramat announced they were closing, in the awkward tone of someone who has every right to do it but dreads it anyway.This meant gathering up three washers of wet laundry and scampering home, so I could hang my things to dry before Montreal’s nightly thundershower left me with damp bedding.
It was very pretty, with crisp freshly bleached besdsheet puffing up in the wind and a soft breeze cutting the humidity. Bliss.
Today I did something I wasn’t sure I could do, which was saw off one third of my counter to make room for a new fridge. I used a (blunt) handsaw and made a complete mess, as I’m not a skilled handyman by any stretch of the imagination, but I did it, and now my hand is all numb and sore from the day of sawing, taking a break and sawing some more.
It’s also probably a better upper body workout than I’ve gotten in ages.
I grew up playing with playmobil, not lego, but it’s cartoon like this that remind me that there’s more fun toys in the world than the contents of my childhood toybox.
Something about Storm Large’s ‘Eight Miles Wide’ rubs me the wrong way. Now I may be missing the point and it’s actually a parody (but I’ve seen it performed super serious by a lovely woman wearing silver emergancy blankets) but is rams up against everything that annoys me about the whole feminine goddess business.
To spoil it for you, the ‘eight miles wide’ is refering to her vagina, which she implies people can fit into. There’s room for everyone to be female in the big metaphorical vagina. Now I’m in now way bashing the shelia na gigs of the world, but where she falls flat is when she refers to the universal vagina. What universal vagina? Mystical goddess core my foot! I’m not my vagina, and if you want to summerize my feminity with one part of my body, I’m going to edge away from you slowly while making polite small talk about the weather. Just like the people who try to talk to me about Jesus on the bus! So there!
Of course the vagina worship shtick is often claiming it’s focusing on the potential creative power of women. (Birthing new life and all that, assuming you’re not infertile.) With so much descrimination against my gender and stupid female modesty taboos, who could blame people for wanting to overeact and shout. ‘VAGINA IS OKAY!’ and dance around with one on their head? Still, there’s two problem with that method of coping, one of which being that it makes sex paramount to gender identity and the other is that a vagina is a pretty arbitray part of a woman’s unique reproductive system to focus on. In the latter case maybe the fact that I didn’t enter the world through a vagina, but via a c-section, as well as making me part of the club of people who can kill Macbeth, makes me under value that part of the body, but I feel suspiciously like the reason why vaginas were chose was because a good portion of the human race wants to stare at them.
I’ve developed a soft spot for another blog, so much so that I did her a fangirl cartoon. She’s really interesting to read, often funny and makes me think about how gender is constucted in kink. So, if you’ve got time to spare and you’re not at work click here for Bitchy Jones.
You can see the cartoon I did for her here: Comic!
The computer gremlin is an elusive breed. Thriving on computers heavy in spyware, they make their nests in the cooling system and fans, living on a diet of keyboard crumbs. (more…)
There’s new poetry out on the current wars in the form of the collection “Exit Wounds“, and I thought I’d add my own contribution. It’s not the best poem, but why not?
I went out last night with my neighbour and some of his friends. It was less than exciting. The bar was very nice but I had nobody to talk to and nothing to talk about, and gossip about people I’ve never met isn’t my thing. It probably doesn’t help that everyone else was drinking and I wasn’t, and they decided to sit near the DJ table, which was sort of deafening.
I left early, but I still slept in to have disturbing dreams. I dreamed my mother had run away and I was being pressured to her where abouts, and I was trying to escape too, to rejoin my love. We were going to co-own a store and had matched little frogs to mark our engagement. Only it was secret becase the people who wanted to find my mother were attempting to control me too. I was plotting to run away with him and he was trying to help me… And then I woke up.
Before dreaming or being bored at a lounge, I had a properly healthy day. I went to the gym and then took a long walk to Atwater, the idea being to price shelf brackets at Canadian tire for the shelves I am installing in the bathroom, but it was also a long exploratory ramble. Everything nice is on sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Being flat broke is depressing!
I also went into a pet store and drooled over the animals. I’m allergic to cats (wah!) but this didn’t stop me from fussing over them through the glass, and admiring the cute puppies and rodents and fish, and the turtles and frogs. Though I have plenty of plants, I find a surplus of maternal urges making me crave something small and vulnerable to look after and cuddle. Fortunatly I can’t afford a proper setup for the pets that were available (a rat of some fish would be less than $20, but holding tanks are more expensive. Even a budgie would be beyond my means, as cute as they are, not for the cost of the poor bird, but the cage, and food, and sparkly things to play with.
So for the time being my plants will keep my maternal side occupied. Isn’t that right my little tomato? Who’s mummy’s savoury plant? Here’s some water… tickle-tickle… Excuse me!
