sh!thawks...on parade

it's not a video of a dog pooping on a baby

2009-01-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

im making some deliciousness in the form of goose meat and a variety of sauces and spices all mixed together in a party of awesome that'll get slowly dehydrated over the course of the day tomorrow.

im saving all the ones with buckshot in it for chad.

i walked around for a few hours today, around patterson, down to meterotown, best buy, back through the mall, ever wary of the lines and numbers of people that seemed to increase in each subsequent store. it was like there was some unheard signal today that masses of people should all abandon the comfort of their own homes, get their cars stuck in a patch of snow for a half hour and scramble to some place where they could fork over money.

i forked over about $3 for two double cheeseburgers at the McSick's on the kingsway side. cause sometimes you just need a cheeseburger. or a double cheeseburger.... or two... whatever...

given the choice between lead or melamine poisoning from sme water bottle made in china or mcdonalds cholesterol and grease, i'd take the cheeseburger any day.

one beer

2009-01-01T19:53:00.000-08:00

when i went to get groceries today i wondered something. there are 24 or 25 checkout counters at the Superstore that's near my place. today there were eight open and the line ups were six or seven people deep at each one.

one of the biggest annoyances i have is something like this. you've got a shitload of people waiting lined up, you've got the staff necessary to help them all faster and more efficiently, but for some reason the store decides to use the least amount of people to help.

why the hell are there 25 checkout counters if they're never all used? i've never seen them all used, have you? if you're not going to use all the damn things, why not just get rid of some and put more stock in their place?

or, you know, actually use them and not create needless lines of people.

if those were my last words i can do better

2009-01-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

the inaugural post of 2009 shall consist of five questions asked by Keira-Anne.

1. Why do you like comic books so much?

What's not to like about them? Actually, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this one trying to figure it out. I've liked them ever since I was a kid, probably helped out a lot along the way by me dad. Much like a good book, a good comic draws you in to the story and the characters. I think in some ways comics can be even better than a book because you have to be patient with the story line. They're another form of escapism different from other forms of literature. You have a visual story to follow which allows you to get a little closer to the characters. When I was little I read them because superheroes offered the possibility to extend imagination into completely different worlds. I don't read the same ones now as then. I used to read Spiderman, Superman, Fantastic Four, Batman, the classic comic characters that everyone easily associate with the genre. I read those because those were the most widely available, the ones my dad would pick up for me on his way home from work. I went on a bit of a hiatus reading them for a few years, but then got back into them with the introduction of the Dark Tower series based off the Stephen King novels. Now I base my enjoyment on comics not only on the story, but the artwork and the mood that the images create. I don't read the classic heroes as much now. I've switched to more independent series where the art is much more engaging, the stories are all new. The bulk of the ones I read now consist of the Stephen King Dark Tower and Stand series, Wastelands, Jonah Hex and The Programme.

The only one I really still try to find that I read when I was a kid is Adam Warlock. He's always been my favourite character because he's always sort of been on the sidelinesand I always thought he reflected a lot of my own ideas. They're a good way to forget about the real world for a bit, they're a way to collect art in a different way, and you build up story lines slowly and progressively. I think people who don't understand their draw, or assume that people who read them are D&D geeks haven't ever really given them a real chance.

2. What was your favourite after school snack as a wee boy?

My sister and I went to a daycare type thing that a Franch woman had three blocks away from our school. After school she'd make a different snack for all of us each day, but the one I always thought was the best was just a stick of celery with Cheese Whiz on it. I'm not exactly sure why, but it was always the snack that tasted the best to me.

3. Name one thing you always said you'd never do but ended up doing it anyways?

Buy something at Le Chateau. I hate that store. I really, really hate it. But when I was living in Ottawa, i walked by the one in Rideau Mall and happened to look in the window and saw a nice looking black jacket. The only downside was that it had that stupid shiny silver lining that so many of the clothes there seem to barf up. I managed to overlook the lining and bought it, but refused to tell anyone where I bought it because I still felt kind of dirty about buying it from that store. Actually, I ended up modding that jacket with a few safety pins and patches to make it look less Le Chateau-ish and more 'going through the semi goth phase' kind of jacket. I don't have it anymore, and I can't remember what I did with it. I think I gave it to one of my friends, but I''m not sure.

4. If you were a comic book hero, what would your name be, how would you have come about and why would I want to read about your adventures?

oh man...such a hard question. well, since I've got creative freedom here and can come up with anything I want... Let's go with The Walker. I'm going to say the storyline is sort of influenced by The Dark Tower and Deathlands in that The Walker doesn't really have any powers and in terms of his surroundings. ok, so backstory...

The Walker can't remember exactly who he is. He knows that there's been some global catastrophe that's devastated a lot of the human race and the world around him. Only the most basic of technologies and machinery is left working. He's known as The Walker because he only walks where ever he goes because working vehicles are few and far between. Since he doesn't remember his own name 'The Walker' title is simple reference to his mystery and circumstance. The story follows The Walker as he wanders through the world trying to figure out what happened to humanity and remember who he is and where he came from, while avoiding being killed by the scattered gangs of looters and killers that have appeared. I'd say that you'd want to read The Walker comics because he's easy to relate to in the sense that he has no powers except for his own intuitions and experience. He's reflective, questioning and the kind of character you feel a lot of pathos for because he's alone and trying to figure out answers to a lot of hard questions. It's probably not the kind of comic that would appeal to a mass audience, but I think The Walker offers a more realistic sense of fantasy than a lot of characters. He's not exactly a hero, and he's not exactly a villain. He's a representation of a lot of the reservations and questions that humans inherently have but might not always like to face. The Walker lets the reader start to feel what it would be like to live alone with no real place to go, trying to survive with the tools he can find and the questions he can use as starting points. I know a lot of people like to read about characters where the circumstances of their creation is set out in stone, like gamma ray bursts or coming from another planet, but personally I think that a character who's past is unknown and a major question in the story is a lot more engaging and interesting. now if only I could actually draw comics half decently...

5. If you were given the opportunity to take photos in a professional studio session with any celebrity - dead or alive - who would you choose?

Randy Rhoads. he's why i picked up a guitar and i've always maintained that he is the greatest guitarist in history. taking pictures of musicians is fun, but taking photos with a legend would be hard to top.

there's a naturalistic blowing through the air

2008-12-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

i sat next to a guy on the plane yesterday who's taking his BBA at Langara who told me he wasn't sure if he had a ride back from the airport because his buddy who was supposed to pick him up had texted him earlier saying "i woke up in Coquitlam, I lost my pants, but i'll still try to make it"

dude's a day early for that.

when i flew back to edmonton my suitcase was 3 pounds heavy. the lady at the counter was nice enough to ignore it. on the way back to vancouver it as 5 pounds over. the lady at the counter asked if i could take something out and stick it in one of the two very full backpacks i had over my shoulders.

what an astute observer you are for noticing that five more pounds of whatever can be stuffed in there.

meh.

i paid the overage charge. 5 pounds cost me exactly $42. at which point i took it as a sign because everyone knows the importance of 42.

anyway. got back. stuffed my face with Pho, headed over to the Mob House to watch the Canucks play a crappy third period and meet an American who agreed with me that Vancouverites dont have a good grasp on how to shovel snow.

OMG. SERIOUSLY. ok, i realize that it hardly snows like this here, but for fucks sake. if you only shovel a four foot space away from your car that you have to spend twenty minutes maneouvering into, OF COURSE YOURE GOING TO HAVE PROBLEMS PARKING. i watched a guy parallel park through a space barely wider than his car last night. it was like he purposely only built a door in a snow berm that big so he could have a fort around his car.

look, Vancouverites, I'll give you some good snow removal advice.

you ARE allowed to bitch and complain about how deep and heavy the snow is. you ARE NOT allowed to do that until after you have cleared the entirety of your front walk. it's just the way it is. likewise, you ARE allowed to complain about snow making it hard to park. you ARE NOT allowed to bitch and complain about it if you only either brush the snow off your car and nothing else, or only clear a tiny little section that you can barely drive out of. if your street is wide enough, you should clear ALL THE DAMN WAY around your car and alternately throw the snow into the middle of the road and/or beside or over the sidewalk but not ON the sidewalk. you ARE allowed to throw it on another car should that care park in a space preventing your own vehicle from easily leaving.

or, if you feel up to it, duct tape a few shovels to the front of your car and just give'r.

anyway.

tonight is New Years. i've never ever made new year's resolutions because lets face it, the likelyhood of anyone ever accomplishign them for reals is pretty low. the only thing i've decided to do this year is to meet some more of the locals that i havent had the chance to meet yet. and try go get a beer float in there at some point. and not fuck up on my thesis defence. other than that, we'll see what happens. you can't tell me that over the course of an entire year you'll be able to stick to one or two ideas you drunkely spout at 1am. never gonna happen. it's way easier to just take things as they come cause then you dont feel some stupid kind of guilt next new years when you try to remember if you actually did what you said you'd do the year before.

don't cheat! love your meat!

2008-12-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

i have to remember that the whole staying up til 3am watching x-files isn't the way to get a decent sleep and be able to wake up before 10. oh season 5, you're going to waste so much of my time in the next few days which i shouldnt really waste...

i went to pick up the pictures im using for my exhibit in january today. i had them done at london drugs, and i go in and hand the photo lady the pickup slip, and she keys it in and all of a sudden i go 'uhhhhhhhh.....' cause the screen is telling me the total is $431 and the slip said $239. so i ask if it's four hundred some cause if it is, fuck that im not paying that for prints. but then she started busting out the coupons and rebate things cause apparently you get a shitload of them with an order this big. i had over $218 in coupon savings. plus, apparently the photo person who developed them decided to make me a second print of everything at no charge. fuck yeah!

now it's only a matter of doing a short write up for each one... and deciding on how to go about the opening night thing. which is ok cause i get to plan it with the woman who's second in command at Harbour Center. or first. i dunno, she's up there somewhere in charge.

i went with my sister today to swap the camera bag she got me for christmas cause apparently my mom never told her she was getting me the Crumpler. i wanted to swap for a MB-200 vertical battery grip or a Lens Baby Composer, or if i felt no guilt at all, a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye.

FOUR STORES, fouuuuuur camera stores i went to and do you think they have any of them?

no.

none.

and that includes the best camera store in Edmonton.

they had no vertical grips, no fisheyes, and they only had Olympus mounts for any Lensbaby stuff, which they only had the 2.0 or 3G anyway. who the fuck only has Olympus mounts?? i don't even know anyone who uses Olympus at all. i don't think i've ever seen anyone use Olympus anything, not even a point and shoot. so i think after i get home tomorrow i'll pop over to Kerrisdale camera that's over by Meterotown and see if they have one.

i have onion breath cause we're having a fondue for our parent's anniversary, and whilst i was prepping the veggies i was eating some of the pieces that did not meet par. i used to hate onions. i also used to loathe mushrooms. not just dislike, but genuinely loathe them. now i'll eat them raw or cooked whenever. especially red onion grilled on a BBQ. oooooooh yeah.

i have a chocolate dreidle.

three times charm

2008-12-28T11:59:00.001-08:00

order in the next three minutes

2008-12-28T01:17:00.000-08:00

i have the third TextBusters ready but the wireless signal im stealing from my neighbour's isn't all that hot right now so i have to wait to upload it.

consequently, our neighbour's dog is spending two nights here cause they went somewhere for the weekend which means i can't go upstairs to get a snack now cause she'll start barking and wake everyone up.

i finished picking the pictures i'm using in my photo exhibit in january about my time in Dhaka. finally. i kept putting that off. it was kind of a pain in the ass cropping fifty pictures so they'd fit in an 8x10 properly. i don't print a lot of shots so i'm always surprised at how much of the feel of the picture you lose when you have to crop it.

sean connery just killed a dude on Red October. isn't it amazing how Russians all have Scottish accents?

i have to start trying to figure out how to pack everything back up to fly back to Vancouver on tuesday. hopefully it doesn't fucking snow ten feet and my flight gets cancelled. floods i can live with. cancelled flights, i could do without.

someone needs to figure out what's going on for new years because a) im lazy and b) see part a.

i need to work on getting a normal sleeping pattern going again.

oh no! they're forming a human pyramid! of robots!

2008-12-26T21:52:00.000-08:00

i've never owned a Bob Marley cd before. now i have three. same with Steely Dan. and now i have two. i guess it's one of those weird things where you like a band or artist but you never seem to have any of their stuff. like Sloan. i like sloan. i have no sloan at all.
and then you end up getting an album somehow and you wonder why you never had it before.

i still have to pick which pictures im going to use in my exhibition in january and do the write-ups for them. maybe i'll do that tomorrow night cause my dad and i are doing guy stuff tomorrow. which basically means you can expect another episode of TextBusters in the near future.

heading back to Vancity on Tuesday. im hoping that nature doesnt decide to dump another three feet of snow on the city right before i fly back and closes the damn airport.

leaky wires

2008-12-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

so, i came home with a suitcase, a backpack and a small camera bag. now i have to figure out how to get back to vancouver with a suitcase, two backpacks and two camera bags. unless you count two camera bags as backpacks. in which case, three backpacks and a small camera bag.

yeah, so now i can include a Crumpler Whickey & Cox and a Lowepro Mini Trekker Classic in the 'object that you wear on your back' count.

couple of dvds, two Steely Dan albums, a new Buffalo zip hoodie, a Buffalo Shop long sleeve T, and a nameless thing that is wickedly nameless.

turkey, gravy, potatoes, cheesecake, you know, the godo foodstuffs.

gonna sleep now.

wrathful Khans

2008-12-24T21:34:00.000-08:00

christmas eve Star Trek movie marathon ftw.

121

2008-12-24T14:26:00.000-08:00

these are without question the greatest christmas tv specials to ever have been made in the history of everything.

whether or not you celebrate christmas have a merry whatever you do celebrate and don't pass up the opportunity to guzzle some gravy and wine.

i'm going to go chill my beer in the snow now cause there's no room in the fridge.

but it's inorganic

2008-12-24T00:29:00.000-08:00

me: some guy is lecturing his kid on how to put books back where they belong in the library

danielle.ciavarro: hahaha damn kids

me: oh man this mall it makes me lose faith in humanity

danielle.ciavarro: people are nuts pat they really really are

me: like acorns or what's nuttier than an acorn?

danielle.ciavarro: pea nut

me: well, is that only cause you get two peanuts per shell?

danielle.ciavarro: yes

me: what about the ones where you only get one?

danielle.ciavarro: they are special

me: but are they still nuttier?

danielle.ciavarro: yes because there should be two of them'

me: hmm good point is a pistachio a nut?

danielle.ciavarro: its like theyve gone mad and split up yes good nuts at that

me: they don;t really seem like nuts

danielle.ciavarro: no but they have shells

me: yeah but they're split open

danielle.ciavarro: oh interesting point

me: you know which nut would be best for porn? chestnuts nuts on a chest it's unavoidable

danielle.ciavarro: very very true damn pervy nuts

me: you know there's Nutella porn? i only know that cause i had a conversation with shaz that was about nutella and somehow it got googled and there is

danielle.ciavarro: ok weird nutella use to be good now its gay

me: yeah but it could be gay in that happy sense like it makes your food gay and delicious cause it's pretty tasty like British

danielle.ciavarro: no it USE to be tasty they changed the receipe

me: did they?

danielle.ciavarro: yea from what i remember it tasting like as a kid they made it healthier

me: i bet the Hazlenuts found out the Chestnuts got a better deal doing porn and all quit

*****

on a completely different note... and i'll warn you ahead of time it's a super geek fest note...

i'm a big fan of science. i used to have a subscription to Discover. i got annoyed when TLC turned into some stupid lifestyle station instead of what once used to be a channel full of dinosaurs and asteroids. thankfully Discovery Channel has stepped up to the plate. for the most part. i mean really, A Haunting? fuck off, that's not a Discovery show. and Cash Cab? Worst. Show. Ever.
any time there's a show on about dinosaurs or space or geology or whatever, i'll come to a dead stop in the channel surfing and watch and learn. of course sometimes this means i get all paranoid about a megathrust earthquake and vow to only ever live on solid bedrock far from a coast line...
anyway, i was flipping through the channels today, choosing to venture away from my staples of Discovery, FoodTv and Comedy Central. i happened upon PBS. and of course PBS has NOVA. and as we all know from our younger days with public access, NOVA fucking rocks. well ok, at first I didn't know it was NOVA, but it was this show about the race to absolute zero. so i watched, all geeked out and waiting for the history lesson to turn into the inevitable discussion of quantum theory, because i know shit all about quantum mechanics but i love to watch and read things about it. about halfway through the show i found out that i, and everyone else who's ever taken a science class, was cheated on our education.
that's right, cheated.
we were all taught that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas.
you know what?
apparently there's a fourth.

CHEATED!

so what if it's based in quantum theory and fourth graders can't draw pictures of it? so what if the name alone makes you shrink back in fear of large mathematical concepts?

THERE'S MORE THAN THREE STATES DAMMIT AND WE OUTTA KNOW!

yep, the Bose-Einstein Condesate. the name just rolls off the tongue doesn't it?

think about it, you go to McDonalds and order, and instead of ice you say "i'd like a coke, no ice, but with some BE Condensate instead"

the cool thing is that it's so cold you'd thnk it should be solid, cause it's almost at absolute zero, but it's not even. it's like some weird state of solid wavelength thing. how cool is that? how would you even handle that? a solid that's not really a solid?

what?

hey, i told you this was super geeky.

ticks and strings

2008-12-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

sometimes things seem so insurmountable that you just sit there and look and have no real idea of how to tackle anything, where to start, where to finish. then one day you look at it and see what you've got sitting in front of you and think maybe it's not as bad as it looks, maybe you're a little further than you thought, maybe little victories amount to large ones when you really aren't looking for one. and in the interim you plug away at it. not in a daze, not at a loss for words, but still not in that place you wish you could be. where words come and go freely and flow and in and out like breathing. exhalation of ideas and ideals. though sometimes isn't that what gets us in trouble.
you can follow conversations but still feel like you're on the outside looking in. you can be presented with a solution, take a good look at it, know what to do with it, but still have no clue how to use it. inhalations of uncertainty. people shift, they flow even when they aren't moving. leaving places gains you new outlooks, coming back to places gives you more perspective. between there and here, where are we exactly? in the middle of things when we open our mouths to say something that we've thought of hundreds of times before, but no sound ever comes out. breathing to survive, not to think, not to make a statement, not to be profound. acceptance doesn't come at an easy price for most things.
we can stand anywhere and look into the same sky, the same sun, the same earth and never know the same things we once knew standing a few feet away.
then you find yourself at a loss for words. then you start to realize that maybe things only look the same to us so we don't have to face the differences. does your breath catch? do you pause for just one second and wonder whether to go back a few paces, or do you breathe out, blink and take that one blinding step forward into some uncertain realm that outwardly looks the same as any other day, but everywhere else it's a whole new throw of the dice.
and all the time you spend wondering this, you can't remember if you've just exhaled or inhaled.

2008-12-22T20:19:00.000-08:00

classic.

cueballs and pointy sticks

2008-12-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

i don't often wax politikal on here as much as I used to but this morning when i saw that Harper has suddenly decided to try and get fucking Mike Duffy into the Senate...

what a fucking joke.

I realize that hypocrisy is an integral part of politics, but for Harper to suddenly do a 180 on his dislike for nominated Senators over elected ones just to try and get an edge in on the Liberals is a pretty weak tactic. If you've built up a reputation as the leader of a party dead set on bringing in elected Senators and then pull this shit just because you can't get your way, I'm pretty sure you've just compromised a large part of your partisan values.

What's more annoying about this is the fact that he's doing it after he himself asked the GG to prorogue Parliament. I'm pretty sure that Steve-o should be using the time before the House resumes to, oh I don't know, try and fix some more immediate problems than jockeying for position in the other Chamber.

It's not like 18 Tory Senators is going to make that much difference anyway. They aren't going to control the majority of the Senate, and there are still more left-leaning party affiliations in there than Tory friendly ones.

To me, this is the equivalent of Harper throwing a temper tantrum over the fact that he hasn't managed to win a majority. and not even a little kid temper tantrum. no. an angsty, whiny, 'i-hate-my-parents' 16 year old one.

you know what's more fun than reading the actual articles on CBC? the comments. mostly because people can't spell. like people who say that Harper has done a good job and should be made our SUPREAM LIDER!

yeah, you keep up that spirit buddy.

going to see Day the Earth Stood Still later.

waking up with pills

2008-12-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

i tried one of these bad boys out yesterday. i probably shouldn't have. i probably should have walked past the photo department and gone to the computer department in the nice little London Drugs we have out here and looked at the new Macs instead, because while I can live just fine with Leonard Katsu, picking up and handling a 700 has not done anything to asolve my brain from constantly drooling over one.
i have to say, from all the reviews and photos ive read and seen, it thing seemed like a monster, but when I actually held it, it was a lot smaller and lighter than I expected. for some reason the demo one they had was kitted with the 60mm f2.8D, but if you actually buy it kitted you get the 24-120 IF. which begs the question, why don't you have the kit lens on the camera? it would make sense, non?
i think the only thing i didnt like was the way the auto-focus looked in the viewfinder, but that's probably cause im so used to mine. other than that, in the little time I had to get a feel for it i *droolz*

that song that goes like that

2008-12-18T22:34:00.001-08:00

i spent a good part of the day in bed because i cant sleep at night and even trying to sleep today wasn't much of an improvement. so now i'm waiting for a sleeping pill to try and work its magic and if it can't then i dunno. i dont have a chronic sleeping problem, but for the last few years i've had issues sleeping in the fall. last year i averaged about three hours a night for about a month between october and november. it gets a little fucking annoying. i get moody, i cant function, my mind goes off in random directions, and i get cranky at people. it doesn't much help when there's not really anyone in town that i talk to anymore which basically leaves my family getting the brunt of it.

im going to move to WordPress when i get back to vancouver. danielle's already started. BUT I KNOW SHE'LL BE A PAL AND WAIT SO WE CAN HAVE A GEEKY BLOGGIN PARTY WHEN I GET BACK CAUSE SHE SAID SO, RIGHT?

yeah, i like that i can still geek out wih people. raul has also offered some help, which i'll probably take him up on cause he's cool like that.

i took this fucking pill like 40 minutes ago and it feels like jack shit is going on.

maybe im immune to sleeping pills. that'd be weird. at least no one could ever drug me then.

i got some good feedback from my thesis supervisor about the latest update i sent him, which makes me feel way better. seriously, i'd been wracking my brain for ideas to put in to make sense and going nuts about it, but it seems like it paid off. whatever it was that i did...

i'm not sure what i'll do tomorrow...either plunk down some more analysis in the thesis, or bum around, head over to see some old teachers maybe. i have dinner with some famil friends tomorrow which should be good times.

2008-12-17T23:05:00.001-08:00

i have a headache, when i bit my tongue the other day it never healed an now it fucking hurts like hell when i eat, the Oil are coming apart at the seams, and too many goddamn people are getting fucking married.

nothing in here starts with q

2008-12-16T22:32:00.000-08:00

i havent had a decent sleep in days. i have no idea why. when i try it sounds like there's a war novel going off in my head or something. it is no fun at all.

this morning, after yet another craptastic sleep, i had to get up early (ie...8:30...) cause my mom signed us up to go wrap stuff for Santa's Anonymous. all the way across the city. sans breakfast. but it was ok cause my dad and i figured we'd just wrap stuff for all the little dudes cause there were like twenty people there wrapping stuff and besides us, there was one other guy. so you can imagine how unlikely it is that the majority of present package things for little dudes actually made sense. i mean really, a stuffed bear, a car and crayons? how about a big ass Nerf gun, a set of LEGO and a monster truck. yeah. sounds about right.
it was weird though, cause i started to notice that the people volunteering would stick to a certain age group and hoard stuff for them. like, going to pick out all the good stuff for 7 year old girls and piling it up on their tables. so, yeah, i might have done that with the LEGO and nerf guns, but come on. you cannot mix stuff with lego that makes no sense to be mixed with it and that is a fact.
you know what else i discovered? little girls get loads of shit donated. little guys, they get jack fucking shit. it gets a little annoying having to sort through three fucking crates of barbies to find one batman toy. seriously, how hard is it to buy a spiderman toy or a batmobile or something that shoots stuff to donate? i bet a lot easier than buying the $30 barbie sets fifty times over. im pretty sure the ones my dad and i wrapped are gonna be fan favourites when they're opened cause there's no goddamn bears in them. lego, super heroes and things to shoot. you cant argue with that. i still buy those things.

we taught the parents how to play guitar hero tonight. it took a while before moving up to Easy, but it was entertaining.

i bit the side of my tongue or something and it hurts like hell.

now i will sleep and try to actually get a decent sleep so i can get up rested and tackle another chunk of thesis tomorrow.

you shoud give farts a chance

2008-12-15T23:50:00.000-08:00

so this random stolen wireless signal from the neighbours is deciding to suck right now, but it's still working enough so that it's not a complete waste of time.
i haven't had much time to go take pictures of anything. mostly because i havent been going to bed til 3am and sleep in til 10 or 11 then get up and go to the library to work on the thesis and then it's dark out.
in the morning i have to get up early cause we're going to wrap presents for Santa's Anonymous.
ok, so apparently if you pluralize Santa, blogger tells you it's a spelling mistake. maybe it's like Highlander? THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE...santa CLAWS!!!!

no?

meh.

i thought the week was going by real fast til i looked at the calendar this morning and was like "WTF? christmas is way the hell next thursday? goddamn that's a long time..."

my zip jacket/sweater thing smells like dog drool. cause it got drooled on hardcore tonight having dinner when a very curious nose was trying to explore my pulled pork sammich.

fyi, again, not my dog. neighbour's dog. except that it pretty much half lives at my parent's place so it's the closest thing to a dog we've got. just so long as i dont have to clean up any dog shit or barf. i still want a pug. cause they're awesome and funny and LOOKIT THEIR FACE!

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

see more puppies

one four one one

2008-12-14T15:16:00.000-08:00

three hours into the first bit of work i've done at home. im at the public library. there's a big ass window next to me which i rather enjoy seeing as how my corner in the lab at harbour center never sees daylight. i've manage to put about half of my results into tables in the text... except that they look like absolute crap, but i'll worry about style or formatting ro whatever later. i've hit that point where i start to bounce around between sections, i add a few sentences here, then move up to a diferent part and add some there and repeat.
tomorrow i might go to the UofA to work, i dunno. i dont really know where anything is there. plus there's public wifi at the library and im not so sure about there.
there's also the fact that it's fucking freezing here and im not sure if i can take any vehicle there and leave it sit there for eight hours and still have it start. that would be uber lame.
my mind is starting to wander more than it should.

the calendar's run dry

2008-12-14T00:35:00.000-08:00

so when i dropped my laptop going through security, something made this little scratch on the monitor that looks like a little hair is stuck to it, but it won't go away and it's driving me nuts. also, our tree is physical proof that Jews and Christmas can decorate each other in harmony. Danielle, make sure you show that to your mom. yes, by heritage, no, there is no practicing of anything of any kind in our household ever. just in case you didn't know.

i had thought about hitting up the UofA tomorrow to get some work done, but it's sunday and it's fucking cold here and everything will be closed, so i'll either work here or at the library in some back corner or something. im getting bored of being bored, even if that's for like a day and a half and i'm starting to feel the 'need-to-get-work-done' brain itch.

i found $30 in dimes and quarters today. i also can't sleep in my room for the first week im here cause my sister is working nights and has to sleep in the basement so no one wakes her up during the day. so this means that i have to choose between watching tv, or sitting up here where there's actually a wireless signal, not both. if i could sleep in my room then i could do both at the same time cause this is the most random signal ever and for some reason it likes some rooms and not others and not necessarily in the way that you;d think a wireless signal would work. like, on the side of the house where i think it's coming from it's pretty good. in the middle, not so much. on the far side of the house away from where i think it's coming from, it's also pretty strong. its like the signal stops in the kitchen to take a break or something.

im glad that in suburbia people still have not learned to lock their networks down. the amily computer has a virus that they say they had taken off, but i should probably not forget to mention this tomorrow cause it's still there. thus is the genius thing when transfering files on a CF card from camera to family computer then to my mac. like, oh hey random siva.tmp file, im pretty sure you're that MSN virus aren't you? ah, too bad you can't hide on my computer. i think i'll just go ahead and throw you away.

i'd like to reiterate that TV here is complete shit. at least in Vancouver I can watch two different episodes of South Park or Futurama back to back on channels that are one number apart instead of watching the same single episode two hours apart on hugely different channels. but i guess that's ok cause OMNI just started here apparently, so it's only a matter of time before the whole schedule changes.

ah, and of course where would i be without mentioning AHAHAHAH OILERS WIN IN A SHUTOUT AHAHAHAHA TOLD YOU YOU'D GO DOWN TONIGHT BITCH! also, yeah, on Wednesday, same thing.

2008-12-13T01:25:00.000-08:00

it's COLD!

there is snow.

there is ice.

there is BACON.

i should write an Ode To Bacon at some point... and i'll call it An Ode To Bacon. well, I can't call it Pork or Oink or anything like that because that leaves out beef and turkey bacon. i should probably sleep cause i have to run around town with my dad tomorrow, and my spelling skills are taking such a nosedive that it's taken me a few times to write this out mostly error free i hope.

there is a shelf on the wall rigt above my head that looks like it is going to fall on me at any second and it is no comfort to me knowing that im sleeping under it.

believe in resistance

2008-12-12T10:13:00.001-08:00

Takeoff
Originally uploaded by sopheava

'I know a town where people are running
Away from life - it seems always funny
They think they are smart
Don't doubt what they say
Scared of a change
Existing only'

Attention por favor: sh!thawks.onparade has now flown the coop to its seasonal migratory home in Edmonton. Dry skin, black ice, and exploding books are sure to follow. please note that it shall return to Vancouver in time for the New Year and plan accordingly.

like nickles at night

2008-12-10T23:48:00.000-08:00

i have my suitcase open, empty, sitting on the floor beside me. usually when i go home, i take my duffel bag, but this time i'm taking this suitcase.
i should have it half filled by now. i should be moving things around in it, taking things off hangers to fold them up in it. but im not. i know i've been afflicted with the odd reminder of Dhaka over the last few months, but somehow seeing this suitcase open, empty, sitting on the floor, it seems strange to fill it again. it's only ever been filled once after i bought it in Gulshan and hauled it back to the flat with Nick. the last time i packed stuff in this suitcase it was to leave what i can only say was the best experience i have ever had in my life.
you think it's weird that a suitcase gets this kind of reaction? i do. i think it's right fucked up. but it's still sitting there, empty and i can't quite bring myself to put anything in it just yet.
i had it up against the wall after it was full. Bimala tried lifting it and told me i had too much stuff. she came to the airport with me when i left and i didn't turn around one last time.
things have odd connections, odd implications.
things have an odd way of never quite leaving your mind alone.

on a completely different note...

you should take your last opportunity to throw your vote in to the mix for the Best of 604 awards hosted by Rebecca Bollwitt. if you're heading to the awards reception, then have a good one. i'll be OCDing my way through my room making sure i've packed everything four or five times.

cup half broken

2008-12-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

2008-12-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

ignoring what needs to be designed

2008-12-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

my breakfast this morning consisted of leftover spaghetti with meat sauce and egg nog because i only have one bagel left, no milk, and i haven't yet reached the point where i feel the necessity to have my cheerios with beer. besides, i need to get rid of the food i have before friday cause i don't want it sitting in the fridge for two weeks while i freeze my ass off at home.

i dont know how cold it is there or how cold it will be, but chances are it'll be warmer than here, therefore credibility is lent to that assumption.

blargh.

i found what can only be described as an amazing tool to make what can only be described as amazing diagrams for things. i'm sure there are much simpler ways built in to the program that would have cut the time i used in half, but whatever. dragging and dropping every piece of a tree diagram in the exact place where you want it and having it look cool is good enough for me.

if this thesis were based solely on tree diagrams, i'd have it in the fucking bag.

i wasn't sure how much i'd be abe to get done today. my sleeping pattern has reverted to semi nocturnal where i dont go to bed until at least 3am, have the alarm go off at 9am, and get up around 10. i can generally tell when i wake up if i think i'll be productive in a given day. i wasn't so sure today, but i had to come pick up a document on hold at the library so i came down here anyway. good thing too, cause i found that ConceptDraw thing, pieced that diagram together, sorted through more of my survey data, and started to get some more ideas rolling as to how to put it all together.

im going to have to actually start doing some writing at some point, and not just playing with data, but whatever. it'll get done. small victories.

today i actually used this phrase when talking with one of the other guys in my program:

"im so out of the loop, it's a straight line."

usually the mail gets to my place between 10am and 11am. so usually i open the door at 11 to see if anything is there. if im home. yet day after day after day after day, nada. i mention this because i believe i was supposed to get mail slash package before heading to dhaka, but then i left before it was mailed, and then it was supposed to get here after i got back. so each day i check and it's not there, i die a little on the inside. yes. see, postal workers dont have to go...well...postal to do that.

on a totally different note, i believe im coming to the conclusion that mixing egg nog with food, while delicious, produces mostly unwanted gurgling stomach noises and burps.

flickering like you're wearing it

2008-12-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

aside from the awesomeness that was NIN, this weekend also saw the 3rd annual Ciavarro christmas season kickoff party, otherwise known as the 'Make Love to My Balls' party.

i think it's pretty self-explanatory.

but for all you new people, it involved drawing a random ornament out of a bag, showing it the affection it truly deserves, and only then placing it on the tree.

i have more pictures from the night, but i forgot halfway through that I switched to RAW for some reason, and im just too lazy to fiddle with them right now.

well, maybe lazy isn't the right word. i actually got my SPSS license to work...finally... so laziness has been replaced with outright annoyance and frustration at descriptive stats and crosstabs because I FUCKING HATE THEM.

if Excel is where fun goes to die, the SPSS is where it lives for the rest of eternity burning in fields of gross statistical lava.

i get to play with that all week til i get to fly back the Edmonchuck on friday and so it some more. and then i get to put all those gross stats into some kind of meaningful piece of text. hopefully.

it took me an hour today just to get SPSS to accept the fact that i'd already put my data into an excel file and wasn't going to re-enter the entire fucking thing into it.

i haven't used that program since last year, so it's kind of give and take. i just spent the last three hours slowly getting back into it and fiddling with the variable values and making it all decide to work and analyze it properly...

yeah.

fun....

totally...

i had a dream the other day where i was walking around a whole bunch of ranom places, but the whole time i was describing everything out loud and i kept thinking "this is perfect, i need to remember this because it would sound awesome" but of course i don't remember any of it, save for the fact that i can remember that's what the dream was.

back in the ages

2008-12-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

full picture set here.

The Bug sucked. there's no easier way to put it. probably one of the worst openers I've ever seen. I know reznor likes to bring obscure bands out with him, but really, that was bad.

the rest of the show, totally not suckage at all.

1,401

2008-12-06T17:39:00.000-08:00

back from the epicness that is NIN. and by epicness i mean everything you could possibly think is awesome times how ever many times you want more awesome cause that's how awesome it was. im a little choked they dropped Me Im Not and The Great Destroyer from the set list but the fact that it was an otherwise spetacular show totally makes up for it.

setlist.

my throat hurts, my body hurts, i am le tired, and have 424 pictures of the show to go through but cant til tomorrow.
i had no idea i took that many pictures. given the fact that i was still jumping around and screaming my head off most of the time, I'm actually impressed i pulled that off.
i basically completely lost it when they started The Wretched. it was NUTSO. quite possibly one of the top nin songs live. also, Ghosts tracks live are unreal. the light show for the entire concert was phenomenal. there's no way in hell any concert is going to be able to top this one for a looooooong time.
ok, shower time. then Ciavarro Christmas Tree Balls Party time where i have to take more pictures cause danielle has designated me the photographer.
MORE CAFFEINE.

just like they said

2008-12-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

have fun not going nuts to what will arguably one of the greatest concerts ever.

2008-12-05T01:43:00.000-08:00

i have no idea what i ate, but my insides sound like a goddamn steel drum band. i made $20 off some drunk idiot on the skytrain on my way home. really, he was the kind of guy you hope you don't have to ride the train with cause they're drunk, loud, brash, wearing ecko and nike and big fake bling all over. anyway, i had four beers left in a six of Big Rock but apparently he was hurting for something to get him from Lake City where I got on to Commercial. so he offered me $4 for one and i said no, they're for my buddy cause i owe him a 6 pack. then he offered $10 for 2 and i said no. then he digs out his wallet and hands me a $20. ok, this is about the point where i wondered how much i could actually get out of him, but seeing as how i didnt actually have 6 beers and he would have eventually found that out, i figured $20 was good. plus i timed it so that when he asked for a third i made a big show of it, handed it to him right as the train got to Gilmore, and walked off $20 in hand, got on the nex car back and continued on.
ok, so i'm down three beers, whatever. $20 for three bottles is pretty close to $7 per bottle. not a bad return considering the six pack was about ten bucks. plus, it equates to merch table at the concert. beer does not buy merch. $20 from drunk idiots does.
i wouldnt make a habit of it. but i had to try not to laugh cause the guy was like "dude, guy, come on, i tried to hustle you, you tried to hustle me, you cant hustle a hustler man."
oh, right, plus there's the fact that somone must have mentioned something to the skytrain people on the next car or something cause when i swapped cars, they went in and confronted the guy about drinking on the train. see, $20 up and laughing. i bet i got that from my dad's side of the family.
hey, sometimes you have to cherish the small victories just as much as the big ones.

short cords

2008-12-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

yeah that's me when i first moved to Vancouver.

i have some pictures of Smemo and Umbrella Boy's dinner last night but i'll put them up later cause i kind of came to a standstill this morning. i can feel the lines tugging away, trying to pull me off balance and fall off the ride. maybe i shouldn't try to get any stats work done today, maybe i should kick back for the weekend and start up again on monday. i told myself i'd relax this past weekend and never really did and haven't really since. every day i've felt this inherent responsibility to go sit in my corner in the lab and type things. not even productive things, but type things nonetheless. desire to do can be a downfall. seems like irony to me.

something like a blank slate, but when you take a closer look, you realize that it's not so empty after all, that if you look closely there are small pieces hidden away in it that are all important but the bigger picture makes everything seem kind of dull.

now with 50% more moisture

2008-12-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

if by some crazy fluke of universal existence and reality suddenly decides to bend to what i'm thinking about right now, the universe would be kind enough to somehow change the supporting act for NIN from The Bug to Puscifer because there's no fucking way i can go to Vegas in February for that show.

either that or somehow find out where to buy Maynard's Caduceus wine in Vancouver.

just in case they could be watching with their shiny satellite

2008-12-03T01:14:00.000-08:00

i've had echoplex stuck in my head for two or three days now. only a few days now. i finally saw the new James Bond movie and it was pretty damn good. im pretty sure the low point was the movie song. honestly, in the gamut of Bond songs, you know this one ranks pretty low.

i had a really fucked up dream last night. not weird in the fact that it was all over, but weird in the way that it was completely one track and never changed at all from what was going on. it's been bugging me. i had another one the other day that stuck to the same pattern too. usually my dreams are all over the place strange, so when they dont deviate from anything it tends to stick in my mind. they also seemed very poignant which never happens. so again, aside from NIN songs stuck in my head, i've got these hanging around too.

i've started to hit the post semester sleep pattern. it feels like it's midafternoon right now so i really have no drive to go sleep.

you know the shitty thing about uncertainty? you're never really certain if you're uncertain about something.

i jump from every rooftop

2008-12-02T02:16:00.000-08:00

here's the problem about having a program function out in stanley park; you're not close to anything. yes, free food and a wicked view of the harbour are things to be considered, but having twenty or so people haul their collective asses down to the Lamplighter in gastown is a bit out of the way.
i'd never been there before. it's not bad actually. someone actually voted against the cambie which is tantamount to sacrilege, but seeing as how most of us were actually dressed up a bit too much for there, i guess that's fair.
i'd also never been to a mcdonalds drive thru in a cab before, but when you split a cab with someone who's hungry and you happen to know where there's a mcD's on the way then it works out. especially when you get half a cheeseburger out of it.
if i hadn't been in a bit of a rush this afternoon i'd have taken some solo shots of the shirt, thin tie, suit jacket combo i sported that pretty much got endless compliments. and seeing as how tomorrow im not likely to do that, meh. unless someone has a picture somewhere, i dunno.
i sent in my last paper so im basically finished the semester. except i get to spend most of the next two weeks still in the lab redrafting thesis stuff. except this weekend.
did you ever wonder if at some point you could run out of anything at all worth saying? i know that everything you write down on the internet is effectively an opinion about something, but really, is there a point you hit where what you write has absolutely no bearing on anything?
shut up. i know you're going to say yes here.
and on that note, seeing as how i have little else to contribute tonight, i'll sleep.

oop, wait. first everyone go say happy birthday to keira.

now go to sleep and dream of Red Dwarf.

somebody order some exploding pants?

2008-11-30T23:03:00.000-08:00

for all intents and purposes i'm done the semester. i have to hand in my last paper tomorrow and that's it. tomorrow night is also our program christmas party which i kind of deleted the email about so im not entirely sure when things are supposed to start. apparently it's somewhere in stanley park.
actually, while the semester is over, i guess it doesn't really count anyway. seeing as how i get to spend the next month and a half in rooms and libraries and desks and chairs writing, writing, still writing, there's no real definitive end to anything.
now i have to convince myself not to drop the ball on this and figure 'i have time to take a break'. i mean, yeah, i do need a break after the semester. it hasn't been the easiest four months of university i've ever had.
i keep having little flashbacks to Dhaka. i overheard some of the first years talking about it the other day, cause JR is trying to recruit a few more to go next year. for a minute i felt like running down to his office and asking to go again.
i think im going to try to keep this week low key. ok, well, this week insofar as to not include monday or friday or saturday. any day in between can be low key.
friday will be the first time i've ever gone to another city for a concert. everett and i are hopping on the ferry at some point in the morning and chilling out in Victoria before jumping and yelling and screaming and generally having a blast at NIN. im hoping they dont check for cameras cause i'd like to bring my panasonic in. i can fit it in side pockets in my concert pants. yes, i have concert shorts, they happen to be the same ones i use to go hiking in, so they're long and camo and have pockets on the side. and most important, zippered pockets so as not to lose anything.
i also have to remember to go to the SFU computer store and buy a license for SPSS so i can actually analyze my survey data.
im meeting with my supervisor on tuesday afternoon to find out exactly what the fuck is going on in my head plan wise for this thing. i need to be sure that im totally not going to shit the bed while writing it. that would be bad. bad bad bad.
btw, i hate SPSS. i should have seen this coming. i designed an open-ended survey to collect qualitative data so as to minimize stats work, but basically created qualitative questions that could be measured quantitatively. i have no idea why i never thought i'd have to do stats work when i was super pleased with the fact that i'd done that.
i think i'll step away from thesis work a bit this week to go through the pictures i need to sift through for the photo exhibit in january. i have to do write ups for each one. i also changed the day for that to the 16th. in any case, invites are going out so people will know anyway.
i have this weird thing i do when i live somewhere that after a certain amount of time i desperately feel the need to move things around to a new layout. given that my room is pretty small and the bed basically fits in one way, this has been driving me absolutely nuts. im thinking i'll have to default to the living room, but even then there's only so much that can be moved. lately i've found myself wondering if i'll stay in this place if i manage to find a job in town. this place basically screams male student. but it's cheap, it's bright, and close to transit. also, i dont think i could live in the west end, and i saw that Cascadia mega earthquake show on discovery channel again the other night that first birthed my paranoia of living downtown in Vancouver. well, maybe not paranoia, but creeped out enough to never want to live in a tall building on anything except solid bedrock far enough from the water to not have to worry about a tsunami.
where was i going with this? i dont remember.
my landlord put a giant christmas cactus down here in front of the window. it's huge. it's like whoopi goldberg had hair made of plant and planted it and put it in my living room.
i went to see Transporter 3. it was ok. not great, but it's still good to just let your brain mush out to awesome cars and fight scenes. the plot was probably the worst part, but the saving grace to those movies is always the fact that cars, chicks and fights take your mind off it.

Smemo'd and the Umbrella'd Boy

2008-11-29T13:15:00.000-08:00

Smemo and Umbrella Boy had been forgotten until i decided to go back through what pictures i had put up on buzznet. and then all the FOB and MCR emo wannabes hoarded the site and fucking wrecked it.

anyway.

i now present the LIST OF IMPROBABLE CHRISTMAS GIFTS ON AN IMPROBABLE LIST THAT WILL PROBABLY NOT BE CONSIDERED AS PROBABLE.

1. Tokina AT-X 107 DX 10-17mm Fish-eye lens

2. A WRC spec'd Imprezza

3. Nikon D700

4. The always present vintage '57 Gibson Les Paul Custom Black Beauty with triple humbuckers

5. Knoxx SpecOps stock

6. Benelli Super Black Eagle II with SteadyGrip and Realtree APG HD

7. Sigma SD14

8. Sigma 8mm f3.5 DG Fisheye lens

9. Sigma 4.5mm f2.8 EX DC Fisheye lens

10. Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 IF-ED lens

11. Two Nikon SB-800's

12. Marshall MG250DFX

13. A house in Manzanita

14. No student loan debt

15. All of the Star Wars Lego sets

16. Hang gliding lessons

17. A trip to Portugal

18. Audi S5 4.2 FSI for those days when driving a rally car just isn't happening.

i just realized i have the set list from last year's HIM concert still tacked to my wall when i didn't even really want to go but Everett pulled the 'come on' thing so i went and laughed at all the 14 year olds who thought they were vampires.

suddenly there were birds

2008-11-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

the internet exists to pander to our sense of narcissism. and for porn. anyone who tells you otherwise is completely full of shit.

oh, and to tell us that it's important that we know that some random Canadian voice actor was injured in Mumbai. cause that's news you need to know. when that whole thing started, i wondered how long it would take for the first mention of some actor or model to pop up. less than a day. like, remember when the tsunami hit and everyone was all 'oh that's terrible!' and then like a day later the news was like 'a super model was caught in it!' and everyone was like 'FUCK THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END EVEN MORE SO THAN BEFORE NOW BECAUSE A RICH SUPER MODEL WAS THERE SO WHO CARES ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE!'

the internet is also for making us think that.

more than half full but less than mostly empty

2008-11-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

im still working on my social policy take home. cause it's fun like that... it's one of those things where you probably could finish it in a few hours, but you're pretty sure that you'll have to abandon any attempt of that at some point otherwise the answers that are already being pulled out of your ass will get worse and you'll just get more frustrated and end up doing that thing where you skip through notes, websites, and end up looking for videos on youtube for 'just a minute' and twenty minutes later you try to remember what it was you were looking for in the first place.

i could easily tell myself i can go work on this thing at home, but i know that if i do, the most work i'll get done is looking at different blog templates to play with. and then i'll have to come back down here tomorrow to finish it off. which i'll probably end up doing anyway. or i could crack open the red bulls in my fridge and give'r til 3am.

one of the things that happens when i work in the lab is that i lose any sense of time at all. at 2:30 i thought it was about 8pm. and ten minutes ago i thought it was around noon. and now it feels like it's about 6:30. it's all a mess and warp of notes and paper and typing and DOTN on repeat. and the odd whiff of humous cause i got lunch at the mediterranean place in the food court.

i have to buy an SPSS license cause i guess i'm now doing crosstabs on my survey results. which pisses me off cause i was hoping i only had to do simple stats on it which is why i made the fucking thing open ended cause i hate stats work and working with quantitative data makes my head explode.

i can't decide what to write now. this leaves me no choice but to go back to trying to gice a succint critique of perceived advantages of the 1996 Seniors Benefits proposal...

cooking in tin pans

2008-11-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

we got out social policy take home today. it's due friday at some point. i won't go any further than to say expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive expletive. i showed it to some other people who all gave me the same reaction. the 'hah, yeah, good luck with THAT' look and laugh.

i've been watching a lot of Top Gear the last few days, and i had to try hard not to sound like Jeremy Clarkson when giving my last presentation of the semester.

crap. i just realized that i missed the new Billable Hours...

i've been tossing around the idea of hopping over to wordpress. i dont know why. i dont know how. but i have been.

the shelf in the room

2008-11-26T01:13:00.001-08:00

im gonna be perfectly honest and say that the prospect of finishing this degree and this thesis scares the shit right out of me. half the people in my program are already thinking CAREER MUST FIND CAREER! meanwhile i look up out of my daze of essays and research most of the time and think WHY IS IT ENDING SO FAST?
almost every day for the last two months, one of the first things that's gone through my head when i wake up is 'you can always walk away from it'. truly. this sentence goes through my head at least once every other day. i think the part about it that makes me worry is that sometimes i stop to listen to it for a few seconds.
and then i go about my business of heading downtown for class, or to sit in my corner that i hope no one else sits in to work on stuff. and i stare at a screen and articles and word documents for hours and leave to go home satisfied most of the time, knowing that i've taken a chunk out of something i've set before me.
and then i wake up the next morning and think, you can always walk away.
but i won't. and not because it would disappoint my family or my friends or my profs, but because i know if i did i'd disappoint myself the most.
do i have issues with self-confidence? hell yeah i do sometimes, so does everyone. sometimes i wonder if i'll make it through this degree with my friendships and my sanity intact. and every day i get up, and i get right back at it because it's there for me to do.
in a year and a half, this program has seen me get depressed, have panic attacks, have two month long bouts of insomnia, get sick from stress, put strain on relationships, pissed me off, put me $30 grand in the hole, confuse me, and generally beat the crap out of my mental capacity.
does this merit bitching about it? sure it does.
but for all the bullshit i've put up with, and all of it that's left to go through in the next five months, i would do it all over again.
because i think at some point you come to a realization that if you can recognize what you have to go through and still have a good time, then you know that you'll be alright. yeah, you might doubt yourself, but back in the depths of your mind, you know that if you take what's coming at you, hit it back as hard as you can and look up and say 'What's next?'
everyone's going to have those instances where it seems like the whole fucking world is crashing down around you, and at that point it's good to have people around to help you back to your feet. but at the core, there's the reality that you need to be able to be strong enough to get back on your own two feet on your own.
some people believe that some higher power will help them through tough spots and keep them going through life. you know what? hats off to them, they think they have something to lean on. i can respect that. but personally, i think that the biggest pillar of support should be yourself. if you can't put more faith in yourself than anything else, you're never really standing on your own.
i fully expect to be driven near crazy getting this thesis done, but i know that at some point in april, i'll walk out of a room having just been evaluated by peers and profs, and be able to sit back, smile, and know that i'm still standing.
and then i'll probably blow $50 at the Cambie to drink the adrenaline away.

Captain Tripps

2008-11-24T00:52:00.000-08:00

those guys weren't actually doing parkour, they were jumping off heating vents three feet high with one of them taking pictures to make it look like they really were. and they did more posing on the edge of the roof of Shrum than they did any real running around and jumping off things. i'd like to learn to do parkour but seeing as how my leg is still giving me grief after i strained something in it in october, that might be a ways off. were i to learn it, i'm pretty sure i wouldnt have the presence of mind to take pictures of me posing trying to look like i know what im doing over actually doing it to make sure i know what im doing. know what i mean? besides, action shots of that would be way cooler than just sitting on a roof and getting a backlit shot.

i am so not impressed with the speed of the internet at my place now. it took me four hours to upload 30 pictures.

all adders are puffs

2008-11-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

i feel like making jell-o but i can't decide which flavour.

waiting on thin ice

2008-11-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

FINALLY!

Your application has been categorized as 'minimal risk' and approved by the Director, Office of Research Ethics, on behalf of the Research Ethics Board in accordance with University policy R20.0

i made pretty good progress on the draft yesterday, so i haven't had that many things to pick through today. basically all i have left before i send it in today is a completion schedule and a rough outline of the word count per section, which isn't all that important cause my supervisor basically said it's just to see if it's going to be weighted in the right way.

chugga chugga wow

2008-11-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

i had uploaded some pictures of the pile of stuff all over my desk but then when i looked at them i realized that i had left my notebook open to a page with info on it that isn't supposed to be seen by anyone not doing my thesis. so they came down. instead you get pictures of George hanging off my ceiling.

i actually managed to get a decent amount of work done at home today. i had planned on going downtown to work but when i got up and it was pissing rain i figured screw that.

for some reason the internet at my place has been slower than shit today and it's annoying the hell out of me. when i get in a good work groove i like swapping between pages at the pace im going. today i've had to sit and watch pages load. i timed my flickr uploads and was hitting the same upload speeds as i was in Dhaka. i bet it's cause the CRTC is being fucking retarded. i really don't understand that. the same issue was brought to court in the US against service providers and they all lost. i'd really like to know why Canada is screeching to a sudden halt in broadband expansion. maybe someone has some crazy idea that because Canadians are all polite they need slower internet speeds because otherwise they wouldn't have apolite handle on things. which really, when you think about it, the reasoning behind Bell's argument was that a small portion of subscribers were overusing the network. ok, well, i would think that those people using that amount of bandwidth would probably have T1 lines, or at least a lot of them would. so why not just fuck with THOSE people and not the rest of us? actually, no, scratch that, cause at some point in the future i'm pretty sure i'll be looking at a T1 line.

our thesis template has everything aligned to the left. this annoys me to no end because everything i write is always aligned fully justified. and for some reason when i update the table of contents it won't pick up my tables. fack.

my ethics application is FINALLY getting sent to the actual review board after six friggin submissions. watch they'll look at it and be like, "can you fix this please, and after you do we'll get back to you in a few weeks." meanwhile my brain is like SPLODE.

i should probably start thinking about making some dinner.

up like a balloon

2008-11-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

a title change has been made. to what you ask? to that which has been occupying me for months. fuck off, i can be obtuse if i want. i figured maybe i'd be more motivated to work on my thesis if i gave it a better title. so i did. i think it's clever so i don't care if you dont cause you aren't writing it so there. nyah.

new title: Curing What Ails You: How Policies for Nurses can Improve Health Care Delivery in Bangladesh.

see? much cooler than before.

it's very give and take this whole thesis writing business. you give it another chunk of words, you take a chunk away. you give another chunk, you sit there and think, shit that other chunk in that other section needs fixing now, so you take out another chunk. but slowly, sloooowly, the word count increases. i can probably get up to about 6500 words today and tomorrow just fuckin give'r.

i've been in Vancouver for five years, but i think growing up in alberta and spending 20 odd winters in cold and snow still means my body thinks it's strange that it's not cold and snowy out right now. i was thinking that on the skytrain on my way home after class today. basically i have one class left in the semester and then it's one more semester to go. it's not like im super buried with work since i do have that tendency to go nuts on stuff early to get it done, but today was one of those days where you have that sudden realization of "oh shit...."

had me a few of those, but you never really see them coming do you?

my trial of iWork '08 is up so i had to go back to powerpoint for my Cities presentation this morning. im not spending $80 on a license when one of the people in my class offered me a key for it off a family pack. now if she'd just show up to class... i was a bit disappointed at having to do this cause Keynote rules and everyone in the class was mucho impressed with it for my last two presentations. i was more disappointed cause it's easy to set a soundtrack to an entire presentation in Keynote and annoying as hell in powerpoint and since im doing my paper on noise pollution i wanted to put Rock n Roll Aint Noise Pollution as the background music but couldnt. i could have turned it on in iTunes of course and just run the powerpoint slides, but that's one step too many for simplicity's sake. or i was lazy. either one will do fine. either way i pulled it off fine.

i told my mom the very short list of things i would like for christmas. i should have added a bottle of scotch.

here's how my mind works in weird ways when i have things to do. i sit down, work on thesis while doing laundry, come back to work on thesis, laundry is done, hang half of it, write a bit more, then stop to blog about how i changed the title and mention how i still have half a pile of clean laundry waiting to be folded or hung up.

brown bagged cookies

2008-11-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

Stitch is the best cartoon character ever to exist ever. even more awesome than Pinky OR The Brain.

in second place, even though he's not a cartoon character, comes Mr. Tinkles from Cats & Dogs cause he's maniacal and furry and he masses an army of fun.

there is no point to this really. but know you know how simple it is to entertain my brain.

gonna run down on the water

2008-11-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

went for Indian food last night and the first bite with the cilantro dip sent my mind swimming back to the intersection in Sector 3, sitting in a rickshaw outside of Songan, smelling the haze and smoke from the kebab restaurant on the other side of the street. hearing the horns and bells, ringing like a choir with no direction and told to keep playing and playing until the streets are too dark. potholes and piles of crushed bricks, puddles and oil, the garbage on the side of the road. a strange contrast to the world outside. bright, clean interiors, dark, dirty streets. smiling inside, smiling all the way back. because the ride there was fun, the food was good, the ride back was calming even in the dust and noise. things you'd go back to. things much simpler than your own. leaving one city to find another waiting. rain clouds hanging low, unsure of the direction they want to go. standing on the rooftop watching it all blow down. seeing smiles and laughter, sights, sounds, friends. sleeping in nets and knowing that the morning will wait for you with something new. voices at the table, and the day starts again. one bite. one taste. countless memories.

titles of conversations

2008-11-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

i gotta say, i like the whole handing out individual tasting glasses this year better than the plastic cups last year. year two of Hopscotch pour moi. danielle was kind enough to drive chad and i cause scotch is tasty and the floor might have been moving a bit by the time we left. i had a decidedly better time this year than last year cause last year i was in a pissy mood and didnt have as much fun. well, ok, yesterday i was in a pissy mood most of the day too cause of the whole three days of writers block thing. but this year i said Fuck IT! im gonna have a good time! and i did.
i like going over to their place for dinner cause the conversations always involve hand waving and yelling and i get to laugh.
topics of conversation were many and broad over the course of the night.
in three weeks i'm going to victoria with everett to rock the fuck out at NIN.
i got a bit of the work bug back today and have managed to add some more to my lit review section. slow but sure. i think the Slayer helps a bit.
i called my dad yesterday after i got home from a pretty useless few hours at harbour center to vent about not being able to get anything done. i've heard a lot of his stories about university over and over and over and over again to the point where I know a lot of them before he starts into one too much, but i listen every time cause there's something comforting in hearing them over and over again. plus there's the odd time where he might drop in a new gem.
maybe i'll go see the new Bond movie tonight. why not?
the ethics office is still giving me grief over my application and research. i've submitted it five times filling it out exactly how they ask me to each time and still they come up with things they dont like. thanks guys, way to make an already stressful project more craptastic.
i should get a haircut.
oh right, i forgot, so wearing a shirt you bought in Bangladesh and wearing an oilers hat are good for many things at many places. for example, they are good for holding people at rapt attention describing the cultural differences in third world countries after you complement them on their spinach dip recipe, and for getting free Big Rock all night because albertans are cool and the Warthog Cream Ale is the greatest beer ever that i hadn't had in forever cause it's near impossible to find the damn stuff in Vancouver. if you know where to buy it, TELL ME.

i am the voice inside your head

2008-11-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

i'm far off my game. i haven't managed to get much of anything done the last three days. it's turned into the game of sit, put everything in front of you that you need to work on, then sit there some more and just stare. or you write a sentence and then you dont like it so you delete it. and you do this over and over until the realization sets in that you've done nothing to increase the word count for about three hours. and the annoying thing is that when you've removed yourself from the situation, when you're not sitting there trying to get the work done and you're thinking about it somewhere else, you've got a completely clear idea of what you need to do, what you're going to write, and where you're going to put it. and then you sit down to do just that, and it's nowhere to be seen.

the abandonment of creativity juxaposed by its nonexistence.

newsprint for the rest of us

2008-11-11T17:34:00.000-08:00

like the last few years Everett and I headed down to the cenotaph at Victory Square for the Remembrance Day ceremony. it ended up being the best one we've been to so far, with the least amount of cheering, no kids with toy guns, and no one talking on their cellphone. well, ok, at one point on the far side of the square some woman was screaming her head off but that lasted about thirty seconds cause some security guys dragged her away. the only oddball who really showed up was this dude with a big placard that said something about "Side Trucer Supreme Being and his Supreme Courts!" and was dropping leaflest on the ground. but kudos to the guy for not making any noise at all, and durng the moment of silence he was dead still and praying, so let this be a lesson to you all, you may be as crazy as you like at this ceremony as long as you stay silent and stil pay your respects. cause people appreciate that.

that would be the destroyer my dad served on. i make a point of finding that picture every year on this day, and probably will til who knows when cause it lets me take a look at just a sliver of what he lived. i know there's no real approximation for any of that, i've heard some of the stories he has but at least that picture does anchor it visually a little bit. i dunno, everyone has their own things they think of today, and this is mine and mine alone.

my landlord just brought down some chicken fried rice. i dont think im totally over the chicken with rice thing yet after this summer, so i'm gonna go ahead and leave it all for my roommate for whenever he appears and i will rock leftovers.

today is also the consecutive integer birthday of an italian who apparently needs to think about no cutting his hair or shaving for six months when close to $200 is on the line. happy birthday buddy.

drive straight up that little squiggly thing

2008-11-11T00:06:00.000-08:00

so evidently i went through my pictures and pulled out concert ones just cause why not?
i downloaded season 2 of Billable Hours cause it's fucking awesome and Showcase needs to put it on DVD right now.
i made a stirfry tonight. it turned out ok i guess, should have added a bit of honey or something to go with the lemon juice. also fyi, if you can't find bean sprouts to use, alfalfa sprouts are not good to use at all.

fighting a fight with the water line

2008-11-10T10:11:00.000-08:00

for the briefest of moments this morning, between the hazy, half-sleep of hitting the snooze button more times than necessary, I thought it was July. I thought this because I woke up this morning to the sound of a lawnmower. in november. i have big thick ugly drapes on my window in my room that basically blot out all existance beyond the glass, so i never really know what the day is like until i go out into the living room with it's gigantic picture window and either see pouring rain or, like this morning, get blinded.
on those morning where i get blinded, usually I go 'yayyyyyy suuuuuun!" which is then followed by "noooooooo....cooped up writing papers all day......." and then by the time i leave to come home later today, it'll be dark out, so really, I get to see how nice it is for the duration of the skytrain ride downtown.
i should set my alarm for an hour earlier than it is because i generally hit the snooze button that long anyway, and if i tell myself i'll get up at 8:30, then usually my feet hit the ground at 9:30. i have to make sure i get to harbour center before noon otherwise i risk losing my fav spot in the corner that no one can see.
i've been having very ordered dreams lately. it's hard to explain. they're very formualic, which im not sure if that's weird or not given the fact that usually i have supremely fucked up dreams. but these ones are almost predictive the way they flow. i dunno.
cheerios then head out the door.

abstract paper pipe cleaners

2008-11-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

i'll have pictures from dario's birthday thing at the Shadow up later. i'm downloading season 2 of Billable Hours cause it's awesome.

im going to try for at least another 6 pages of my Cities paper tomorrow.

i went for a walk through Metrotown yesterday cause i was bored and i have to say that i really dont like all the christmas decorations that are already up. usually when i go through there i always have headphones on cause i really don't like the noise but yesterday i left my ipod at home and i should have brought it cause really, the mall noises in there are creepy. it's like the spectre of credit haunts everyone who walks through the doors and makes people speak in strange shoppy voices.

apparently i can fix other people's Word programs over MSN just by thinking about it working properly. yeah, skillz, i haz dem.

2008-11-08T02:13:00.001-08:00

sometimes i think that if there were to be horrible calamity over night and the world went to total hell, i'd wake up, shrug, and not really care.
i think next week i'll go to the clinic again to see about some sleeping pills. i generally don't like taking pills cause i've got this ingrained paranoia that i'll become totally dependent on anything i take that's not an advil which is probably why i still have 11 ativans left from a perscription i had in february.
my dinner consisted of a beer and a freezer burned, baked enchilada.
i can tell i'm feeling stressed even if i don't recognize it immediately because i've stopped actually hanging my laundry up and started just throwing all the clean stuff in a big pile on my dresser. also that i've stopped putting assignments and notes on a shelf and started leaving them in random areas on my bedroom floor.
i have nothing substantial to say. im going to go try to fall asleep, probably fail at it, and toss and turn til 4am until i do and then get four hours of sleep then wake up and try to figure out how to best approach the day.
good news, i bought milk so i dont have to leave my cheerios hanging.

stuck inside our own machine

2008-11-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

i finished my social policy paper. i'm not sure how. somehow i turned one pamphlet and a news release into 20 pages. it's a strange feat if you ask me.

i like this picture. it's one of my favourites that i've ever taken. betcha can't guess where i took it.

last night i actually slept. like, really truly got a full night of restful sleep. im not even sure when the last time i had that was. last year in october i had insomnia for about a month and would get anywhere from two to four hours of sleep for days on end.

this morning i totally dodged what could have been a fatal thesis killing bullet. and for a stupidly simple reason too. i guess i have to be thankful that it was that simple a problem and that all it took was a frenetic phone call to get it sorted out.

im not sure how long i've been here today. i know it's less than 8 hours but more than 6. i also ended up giving an impromptu recruitment session to some of the first years interested in going to Dhaka for their co-op. i need to go to superstore and get milk because it's hard to have cheerioes in the morning without it.

2008-11-05T21:54:00.001-08:00

i'm not saying it's imperative that you do this, just essential that you immediately stop whatever it is you happen to be doing right now and immediate go watch this.

tapestries on tape

2008-11-05T15:10:00.001-08:00

yeah, that would in fact be me half awake with my cheek squished on the corner of my macbook. i swear i only put my head down for a second with no intention of falling asleep. well, i couldnt have anyway cause i had 1410am online on listening for a quick mention of my CNGPM entry.
you ever done that thing where you're really really really tired and you try ton convince yourself that a nap is ok but then you try and nap but you try and nap while listening to the tv or radio because there's something on that you don't want to miss so you kind of half end up with one eye half open trying to keep yourself awake just enough to hear and the rest of your brain is like "no dude, it doesn't work if you keep one open" but you're all "hey brain, i promise if you wait you'll hear something of value" but your brain isn't really convinced and it keeps trying to shut your eye and you're losing out and then you hear what you want to hear and you give that dopey, more asleep than awake grin because you heard your name on the radio or tv and you're all "see brain i told you so, now you can fall asleep" but in retalitation for not listening the first time your brain is like "sorry Bucko, im keeping you awake now, in a semi cognitive state that you have to deal with to get your work done this afternoon."

and you're all "...fuck."

and so then you start this grey area of self rationalization where you half want to stay awake to see how much work you can do and THEN sleep, and the other half is like, no man, sleep FIRST because then you'll be rested and do better work. but then the first half is all "but after i wake up i'll be hungry, and i'll lose out on having to make food and not work" and then the other half is like "yeah but food and sleep is good for you and you work better after both" and then the first half is like "but when you eat you'l turn on the tv and get caught up in it" and then the seond half is like "dude, you have no classes tomorrow, you can work late and sleep in a bit and still get stuff done" and the first half is like "this is a good point but why not get the work out of the way today and get other work done tomorrow and not have to spread it out as much" and then the third half is like "can't you two shut the hell up? can't you see i'm blogging now?" and then the first and second half are all "oh, yeah, sorry dude." and then they both pause and then at the same time they're like "Hey third half that isn't mathematically possible, how about you stop doing that and help us out instead" and then Third Half just stares at them like he's all "go on, tell me im an asshole, do it, do it and see what happens" and then First and Second half kind of look at each other and they're like "maybe we should just wait til he's done." and Third Half is all "yeah that's what I thought". except now you've let the third half continue what he's doing so ostensibly you've just gone and woken yourself up a bit more which you weren't really sure you wanted to do in the first place, but really, in the end youre like "ok the three of you need to listen, Third Half, wrap this up, Second half, let's make some food now because it's still early afternoon and then nap cause then you wont be hungry after you wake up, and First half, you've got a plan of attack on how you'll finish this paper, so chill the fuck out."

and then out of the blue Fourth Half pipes up and is all "hey man, how do you split your brain into three halves?"

what? you've never had a day like this?

all the vast middle

2008-11-04T18:32:00.000-08:00

All praise the true male bible in all it's Legendary Awesomeness as foretold by the exalted Barnabus Stinson.

All should also rock the hell out to the appropriate musical companion to the Bro Code through the newly released Matthew Good Live at Massey Hall album.

All should also keep their head poised in readiness tonight to either nod in approval at the successful election of Barack Obama, or to shake your head in disbelief that somehow the Americans managed to fuck things up again.

I'm not worried about Obama winning. How not worried? I'm leaving the tv alone to go eat spaghetti and watch the new Russell Peters dvd instead.

Onwards to comedy and victory!

Obama Five!

you har so nex to eem

2008-11-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

i hadn't heard about this until today. yet another reason why Québecers are awesome. seriously, why would Palin think that Sarkozy would really phone her and talk about random shit like this hahahaha.

in a few weeks i get to meet the head of the Canada Revenue Agency. i'll be sure to ask about how i can get someone a tax break. maybe.

2008-11-04T00:06:00.001-08:00

Busy Bees
Originally uploaded by TGKW

i had one of those odd little moments of clarity this evening while drinking a beer with my leftover mac & cheese. it had mostly to do with the fact that for dinner I was drinking beer and eating leftover mac & cheese while watching How I Met Your Mother and felt ok about it.

i'm not really sure how to explain it more than that.

i'd also like to thank miss604 for her mention about my entering the CNGPM competition.

i named this acorn Wally

2008-11-03T15:21:00.000-08:00

i have two papers due this semester. the first is due on the 18th. it's my social policy paper. the point of it is to conduct a thorough analysis of a provincial in-kind benefit program and come up with 20 pages of depth.

ok, normally I'd have no complaints because for some reason I can find amazing amounts of information on virtually any subject. i can be working on my own stuff and someone can ask me if i know anything on what they're doing, and in ten minutes i can have more info for them than if they'd spent all day on it. and no, that's not much of an exaggeration as I've done that several times before.

but this time. oh this time. im looking at the BC Healthy Kids Program. and there is NOTHING. and by nothing i mean i've somehow wirtten ten pages based soley off a single brochure and press release from last year. oh, and one sentence from the Employment and Assistance Act and Regulations.

i even spent an hour on the phone with both the HKP and MSP trying to get information and all I got from speaking with four different people was "ummmm....you know I'm not sure...?"

HOW DO YOU FUCKING WORK FOR A VERY SPECIFIC PROVINCIAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM AND NOT KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IT DOES OR WHY IT EXISTS?

i can stretch things in a paper, but really, there comes a point where you just can't stretch it out anymore. it's not like you can expand fifteen pages on "it provides up to $700 in dental or eye care for children whose families receive MSP premium assistance." if you can make that 15 pages, please, please tell me. i'd love to know. i've hit ten mostly because i threw in some quotes about why children's health is important and repeated the same shit over and over and over and over and over.

i went to talk to prof about it earlier and told him about the virtual black hole of information that exists on this program. now i'm supposed to 'intuit' the rest of it. there's not much you can intuit a lot on "it provides up to $700 in dental or eye care for children whose families receive MSP premium assistance."

i even switched from Times to Arial because the letters were bigger. yes. that's how much trouble this thing is giving me.

schmragh.

what do you mean your pants don't pull up?

2008-11-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

so i haven't used facebook pictures on here for a while so i had no idea they turned out this large when you poast them. meh.

btw, that grey fedora i have totally fucking rocks with my grey two-button suit. spectacularly. except i don't have any pictures of it on my own so i'll have to wait and see if anyone else does.
fyi, leaving your camera sitting on the table while you aren't there and myself and dario are there will most likely result in us stealing it and taking obligatory stupid pictures that we hope you won't notice until much later but wouldnt care if you noticed right away cause it's still funny that way.

go see Zack and Miri Make a Porno cause it's awesome.

i kept thinking the time change was supposed to happen tonight, as in between sunday and monday, but then it was pointed out to me that that makes no sense cause it would make more sense to do it between saturday and sunday. this is why i say that time travel exists. we do it every year. just like that. no super machines. just roll back the clock and there you have it.

this week i'm going to blitz my social policy paper. and pick what class i want next semester cause I only have to take one. sweeeet. then next week im going to blitz my Cities paper. and that's pretty much it for the semester except for a social policy final.

we're trying to get Dario to not shave or cut his hair for six months and then he'll look like a terrorist.

jeepers critter creepers

2008-10-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

i popped a mogadon last night because I was sick of not being able to get a good sleep. ten hours later i woke up and thought 'i had better put those damn tentacles on that thing...'

my tax plan is up for CNGPM.

im going to see Zack & Miri today. tomorrow is the italian banquet and im gonna rock another suit.

now ive gone and lost my train of thought.

jazz hands

2008-10-30T14:28:00.001-07:00

i havent been getting the best sleep lately. usually when this happens i just motor through things and eventually i'll crash and then sleep again. last night i figured i'd try to do a little recreational reading to tire me out and help me fall asleep.
i think it would have worked if i hadn't stayed up til 4am reading... and then waking up at about 9 and tossing around until 10:30 and then finally hauling my ass out of bed and downtown to do some work. i was planning on staying here til about 6, but i've since decided no fucking way and now im thinking maybe more like 3 and then going home and taking a nap. besides, it's not like the day has been a total bust. i have managed to get a few page in to my social policy paper. i like it when they're supposed to be double spaced cause then that means a 20 page paper is only really 9 or 10.
i've done a few days worth of googling, google scholaring, and SFU librarying about the BC Healthy Kids Program and have discovered there isn't a total wealth of information on it. so, you know, if you have any input, feel free to throw it my way.

i am le ugh.

2008-10-30T00:28:00.000-07:00

JOIN THE 'PAT FOR PM' FACEBOOK GROUP!

keeping the pork in the barrel

2008-10-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

so now I'm a competitor for Canada's Next Great PM and i want all of YOU TO SUPPORT ME BECAUSE IT'S TOTALLY THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

you might call me crazy, you might not agree, you might want skittles to buy your vote, i dont know, but I can say without a doubt, that even in just two days I actually feel like I'm applying my education and experience in ways that I have previously shot to pieces. ie, tax and economics...

it was kind of a snap decision on my part to enter, so we'll see how this goes.

in other news... i am going for sushi, and then im going downtown for a Bangladesh Troupe Reunion. then i might sleep in tomorrow. probly not too late though, I have papers to write.

roll up your jeans

2008-10-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

im going to send in a video for that CBC thing about Canada's Next Great Prime Minister because why not. there's only four candidates now and the competition has been open since april. wow CBC, way to capture the interest of the country.

i went to the clinic thats conveniently placed down by the escalators to get my knee checked out cause it's still bugging me since i was home for turkey. don,t worry, I'm not gonna die. i know, sorry to disappoint some people. doc says iliotibial band syndrome. im pretty sure i just gave her a blank look when she said that. and then i might have laughed the 'wow those are big medical words that i have no idea what they mean' laugh.

my brain just wants to turn off today. i got about four hours of half sleep last night.

blargh.

windows in the hallway

2008-10-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

it's just a guy in a chicken suit

2008-10-26T22:23:00.000-07:00

so i couldn't find any blue furry/fuzzy fabric that was light, cheap and that I liked, but the green does just fine. also, since Yip Yip's need a traveil guide, i also made a little Earth Book to carry around. i still have to work on the antenna a bit and add some tentacle things and it's good to go.

not all the pictures from last night, but the good enough ones. Chad, Danielle, Marlee, Dario, Steve, Ryan, Demis, Neil, Me, and Duane who danielle spotted later on and sent chad to go get him cause we had a big table which is like currency at the Cambie.

im not sure we knew why he was lying on the ground at the skytrain station but whatever.

i cant decide if i want instant noodles or egg tarts.

there are still bloggers left in vancouver i havent seen at the cambie. or around in general. when i grabbed a quick lunch with Raul last week we had a bit of a discussion about the dynamics of the community and how lots of people sort of know each other but dont know each other at the same time. i mean really, did you ever think that you'd have one line conversations with other people over twitter? i never did. and now i do. that totally sounded more profound in my head.

egg tarts.

crashing through the lightning

2008-10-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

today seems like one of those days where you're not sure if you think everything is going too fast or too slow. my landlord had the furnace cleaned so now there's actually hot air coming out of the vents.
im glad a bunch of us went out last night, i needed to unwind a bit. but the thing about unwinding, at least for me, is that i spent all week getting wound up and working my ass off to get shit out of the way and done and tallied and all that crap, and when i do something to relax, i always feel bad about taking time off to not do work. for some reason i sometimes think that i function better when my brain thinks it's in a state of semi stressed panic. well, maybe not that far. but if i think i have a crapload of stuff to do to keep myself occupied then i work better, and if im going out to a bar and not doing work then there's always part of my brain thats like "dude, no, you could not go out and stay home and write that summary that's not due for two weeks, but at least it will be done."
i want a nap.
i stepped off the sidewalk too hard and jarred my leg and now my knee hurts again.
i went for coffee with nick who i havent seen for two months and on the other side of the planet. it ws good to catch up and hear what was going on over there.
i also bought a new book today because when i do take a bit of unapologetic downtime at home to sit on the couch for a bit, i want a new book to read.
i'll put up video of the cinnamon bacon rolls that shaz and i made later. same for cambie stuff. just not feeling like it right now.

i think yesterday at some point i used the phrase "Discovery Channel has the trifecta of awesome: Deadliest Catch, Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs". except they lose marks for Cash Cab. that's probably the dumbest show they've ever had on that channel. but they make up for it with the Discover song which is the most awesome thing ever. true story.

on the way home on the skytrain when it went by GM place i saw more Oilers jerseys than canucks. that's because people realy know who the better team is.

2008-10-25T01:37:00.000-07:00

there were two girls on teh skytrain who lthought it was sutpid that chad phoned my phone to leave avoicelmails while i was sitting right in front of him telling him to fuck off cause i had my phone in my hand ready to asnwer but he was like no let it go to voicemail and then proceeded to leave a long fucking voicemail about whatever. i will record it and put it up maybe, i don tknow.
ok. ok, here's the thing, ok, when you go out to a bar and you drink and you ding..or sing not ding you know, you should always keep in mind that you re totally not as good sat singing when youre dinrking than when youre not drinkgin acause if you like tape that shit and listen later you're otnyl going to realize tha and then youre all ;oh no! i cant keep a tune whiel i srink
1 oh no!" and you do it in a british accent to make it sound worse. yeah. i know right?
i think i will not do much wor tomorrow cause i have odne lits of it this week and i want a break or mayeb ill do a bit but not much i dont know.
wtf Camib why were you playing shitting fucking music tonight and overrun by greasy motherfuking hondurans who were crampign ryan's birthday? i also lost in a big way to dario in dibs. like not even funny. like so bad it was shameful. he was up close to twenty within five minutes of us ther. it was a poor game from my end. the worse loss this team has ever sudffered in a high stakes game of dissb.s
also duane was there and that was cool cause duane is a cool guy and we were all like 'danielle you saw him? let's go get him!" dso then chad did. and i think there were iphone pictures. and talk about twietter. and then it was go time. and now i am home. and typing poorly.

can he string form a web...wait...

2008-10-23T11:48:00.000-07:00

ok, spiders don't bug me. spiders bug my dad a lot, spiders don't bug me. i can crouch down and stare at one for a while, even name them.
however, this is not to say that they can't annoy me.
case in point, i throw on a hat this morning, i head down to HC to do some prep work for a presentation next week, and while i sitting here there's a little itch on my neck. so i scratch kind of absent mindedly. but it's still there. so i continue to scratch sort of absent mindedly until it becomes one of those little itches that you kind of get annoyed at for making you actually pay attention to it and you kind of do that little swat at your skin to make it stop.
and then i look down and there's a baby spider sitting on the edge of the table where it has now landed, wiggling it's lil legs around all "Hey essé! Whuatcho think you are dooeeng?"

yes. spiders are mexican in my head.

so I says, I says, 'lil spider, I'm gonna flick your ass off the tablw in that direction cause you fucking annoyed my with your crawling on me. You don't scare me, but crawling on me without permission DENIED."

so i flick him away.

then I thinks to myself, I thinks, "hey self, you know where that hat was hanging, you know that shelf, you've seen some of his buddies hanging around there looking for the spider Chicas."

so I says, I says, "you know what self, you're totally right! we should take off the hat and make sure he didn't leave no Essé in there!"

so off comes the hat, and i flip it over and what do I see?

"Hey fucker! I already flicked your Essé right the fuck out of here! so get out of there!"

of course knowing he's in deep shit now, this second lil spider is all "Hey mang! No way mang! I wasn't dooeeng nothing mang! I was just crawling around minding my own business! I ain't done no crawling on you!"

so I says, i says, "i don't give a fuck. you're not allowed in my hat you little shit."

so he cuts and runs and trie to hide in the fabric but i fold that fabric down so he can't get away and he's all "nooooo mang! noooooo! my Chicas!" and im all "AHAHAHAHAHA EVIL LAUGH!" and then I blow his lil spider ass somewhere that isn't inside my hat.

so that is the story of how I turned spiders into Mexicans.

*Disclaimer: this in no way assumes that Mexicans are as annoying as spiders. In fact, Mexicans provide us tacos and burritos and should be applauded for their hot sauces.

i cant wait for violence

2008-10-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

it must be the fact that as a society we're somewhat infatuated with entertainment that involves some form of violence that the simple act of tagging a person has now evolved into punches in the face. most of the time I'm on the fence about violence in the media. however, when you find out that you've been dealt a blow by someone who's probably way cooler than you are you tend to take notice and then because you know you need to get lots of work done but still dwell on the fact that a little procrastination never really hurt anyone, you throw your fists up and look for some new targets.

5 things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. Rocking the 8th grade.
2. Camping in the Pacific Northwest
3. finding out that Naveed was actually the first release by OLP and not Clumsy
4. Having lengthy discussions at lunch about whether or not space really constituted true 'nothingness'. yes. i was that kid.
5. Playing D&D in class by passing notes around. yes. i was also that kid.

5 things on my to do list today:

1. Present my paper topic on the effects of Urban Noise pollution on Quality of Life in three cities between 1 and 2 million people and that have engaged in some form of noise mapping study using between 100 and 200 measurement points distributed across the geographic area of the city.
2. Have an over the phone exit interview a year after i quit at ING to go right the hell back to school.
3. Read two people's draft capstone intros and provide comments.
4. Find that article I'm supposed to summarize and present next week.
5. Finish filling out the blank spots in my ethics submission form.

5 snacks that I love:

1. Tim Horton's everything bagel with herb and garlic cream cheese
2. Rocky Road Snickers
3. Ichiban Beef Flavoured instant noodles
4. Peanut butter out of the jar
5. any kind of trail mix that has peanuts and dried papaya in it

5 things I would do if I was a millionaire :

1. Get rid of those nasty student loans
2. Take the family to Vegas
3. Ok, this is dependent on what kind of millionaire I'd be. Like, Corey Feldman millionaire or Gene Simmons millionaire? Buy the house down the street that's for sale, reno it and put an Audi S5 in the garage.
4. Buy a vintage 1957 Gibson Les Paul Custom Black Beauty, a Gibson Gordie Johnson SGJ, and a full stack Mesa/Boogie Triple Rectifier
5. Go to school forever.

5 places I've lived:

1. Sherwood Park
2. Ottawa
3. Vancouver
4. Dhaka
5. I don't have a fifth, I'm not exciting enough.

5 jobs I've had:

1. Golf course maintenance crew (three different courses)
2. House of Commons Page
3. Data Services, Office of the Leader of the Opposition
4. Feature Sports Fields Labourer for Strathcona County. Best. Job. Ever.
5. CIDA Intern

5 people I punch:

1. Christina
2. Carrie
3. Meg
4. Shaz
5. Mike

watch stripes

2008-10-22T00:41:00.001-07:00

i can write all i want and it doesnt make a dent. nope. dont you want to out your head down and just see if the world isn't the same when you lift it again. or close your eyes and try to think about ow quiet the world would be if it only it weren't so loud. simple solutions often require the most complex actions. it seems kind of backwards now that you think about it. but then of course the alarm goes off or the phone rings and you can't help but open your eyes again and be honestly disappointed that you're exactly where you were five minutes ago. in the same chair, in the same space, in the same way wondering what it was you're trying to get away from. if you can't find a reason, why even try? confronting things is necessary but if you go looking for one that you aren't even sure will be there is it the same thing? what if you're so aware of the symptoms of your own downfall that you can accept them at face value and then just step around them? that would be too simple, but then you'd have to be complex. everyone is complex, no matter how simple they say their tastes are.
what if two certainties conflicted to the point where they were still both certain but you had to figure out which one wasn't actually. that makes all of life's little quandaries seem obsolete and exciting all at the same time. you know what it all boils down to is if you can ask yourself if you think you're really the most honest with yourself. not entirely self delusion, but maybe self denial works better. i still don't know who i am all the way through. i dont think anyone does. i was walking through a parking lot last night to buy a pizza and a bottle of fresca and started to think about what it was that university actually teaches you. and i didnt come up with academic prowess or an expanded knowledge of the world. i think what it's taught me is that you can try to be the most honest person with yourself but at the end of the day, you're no different than anyone else. i think im a nice guy most of the time. i think im a good guy. i think that the last few years have also taught me how to be a jackass. maybe thats not all bad, maybe that gives some balance to things. i think that it makes you more accutely aware of ehat exactly you're doing. the only trouble there is that you stare things in the face having a good idea of the shit you're getting into but you still don't step around it. and then a car honks its horn and you stop thinking things, and remember to start thinking about what kind of pizza you want.
you know what it all really boils down to is one question which is do you think Smurfs have blue blood?

armed with skill and determination

2008-10-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

may i present the RETURN OF TEXTBUSTERS! MUAHAHAHA AHAHA AAAAAHAHAH HHAAAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAH...

hah.

your roots are showing

2008-10-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

i stayed home to work today. i probably should have gone downtown. last year i could work at home like a maniac. now if i work at home it's an arduous fucking process. that's ok, im going in tomorrow anyway. plus i finished one assignment today. now it's back to the grind of tallying survey results. i should probably start thinking about starting my social policy paper at some point. i know im doing an analysis of the BC Healthy Kids program. yeah. now you know as much as I do.
you know when NOT to go grocery shopping? sunday afternoons. that's apparently the time when there are no carts and no baskets and the lines are the things of dread. so i get my stuff and im in line, and im standing behind this woman and what i can only assume is her daughter. could have been younger sister, i dunno. probably daughter.
oh, btw, i saw The Mist last night and it was meh.
anyway.
so im standing there looking around at the lines of people, cause that's what you do when there are lots of lines, you watch people. so this woman in front of my has her hair cropped short, dyed jet black except for some little line of white just on one side on her forehead. and then of course the Robson Street decor look of scarf, jacket, pants with no pockets, weird fucking shoes. you know, the kind of person who you aren't at all surprised to see in Capers, but you would wonder wtf they're doing in Superstore. so she has this whole hoity toity attitude while she;s standing there and her phone goes off and she picks it up and i guess Husband asks where she is. "I'm TRYING to battle the mobs of lines at Superstore...don't ask me, i don't even know WHY I came here, I wont even buy produce from here."
it's at this point i look in her cart and see that it it replete with no name brand everything and bags of lettuce and carrots from the produce bins.
your ruse does not fool us!
i dont get that. i dont understand why people go to a grocery store and suddenly shove their heads up their asses as if to avoid the smell of bulk bins. you know what this woman reminded me of? that episode of south park where everyone drives hybrids and Kyle's family moves to San Fransisco and everyone there smells their own farts. yeah, this lady would smell her own farts if she were a south park character.
it's a fucking grocery store. no shit some of the produce isn't going to be super crisp. same goes for the long lines. people need to eat. seriously, if you're THAT hung up about your fucking organic lettuce, stop going to a store and grow a fucking garden.
oh but that would dirty up your designer gardening clothes wouldnt it...

srsly.

ive been living at this place for close to two years. today is the first day i met one of the neighbours.

zombies in the childrens room

2008-10-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

my saturdays are exciting. i'll tell you how exciting they are. i get up, i get ready, i go to school. see? exciting. i lost track of when i'd eaten today, so at about 8:30 i was trying to figure out when i'd had lunch, which had been some seven hours previous. but it totally didnt feel like that at all. when you spend so much time squared away in your own little space you sort of lose track of how time really flows. and then you leave and it's dark out and you wonder why.
i hunted down about fourteen baby spiders in my room earlier. i figure i've got mad skillz at that now after i honed them chasing down the roaches and ants and other spiders in Dhaka.
i think Dawn of the Dead is on. im not sure. if im at home i usually turn the tv on for some background noise, and right now it's full of GRRAWR SSNNRR FFRGGRRR and FUCK! AHHH GO! RUN!!!
i dont know what would make me assume that those noises would make it dawn of the dead, and considering ive never seen that i wouldnt really know. but i think it is.
no going hiking tomorrow, so i'll probably be back in the corner at harbour center doing some more work because that's how i roll.
here's my rationale for hiding at school on weekends; doing stuff on weekends costs money. hiding at school doing work does not. therefore, when it comes to pay back money that isnt really mine, the less i use over the course of the semester, the more i have to immediately pay back.
doesn't always work, but whatever.
i used too much oil cooking my perogies.
my ipod is pissing me off. it dies way too fast now. i've had it a year. i dont think it should die as fast as it does after only a year.
i think im going to watch The Mist later.
i watched a lot of Star Trek DS9 while i was in edmonchuck. i never watch it here.

back by my popular demand

2008-10-17T21:44:00.001-07:00

final call 8277

2008-10-17T16:10:00.001-07:00

im supposed to be taking off in five minutes. instead i have to wait another half hour for the plane to take off.

there's some four year old reading over my shoulder.

dozens of smartridges

2008-10-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

bacon and apple pie are a delicious combo. i think i have to go for a family dinner now. and then im going to eat wings and watch the oilers game.

oh yeah, election...

um, duh?

voted NDP. and now that there's an NDP riding in Alberta, the province more accurately reflects the colours of the only real hockey team in the provincial boundaries.

the tv just told me "always repair in pairs".

something funny i forgot

2008-10-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

technically my thanksgiving meal is spaghetti if you want to count that today's meal is officially supposed to by turkey night. but we had that on friday, so tonight it's spag.
we never fired a shot today. none. we also got the first 'no' from a farmer in probably five years about going into a field. you gotta wonder how they're going to recoup the revenue they lose in grain eaten by birds when we could clear them out in thirty seconds...
anyway.
we also got lost somehow. yeah, we're driving south (we think) and all of a sudden we're off the map and way way north of the highway we wanted and then somehow got lost on our way back to the highway we wanted and then thought we were on the highway we wanted and found out we were still lost on the way to the highway we wanted... yeah, we're not sure either.
i still have a cold, i have a semi gimped leg, we've been skunked two days so far this season and i got fuck all for work done cause i spent all day yesterday in bed trying to feel less sick.
tomorrow we're going fossil hunting instead. not guaranteed to find something, but it's probably going to have a better outcome than the geese...

ok, tomorrow you vote. quick note on voting pour vous. everyone says that if you don't think the person you want to get in will get in you should vote strategically and that if you dont vote strategically then you waste your vote.

fuck you, go vote somewhere else.

the concept of strategic voting pisses me off more than most things. the fact that people tell you that you have to vote a certain way to prevent a certain outcome is bullshit. this is MY fucking vote not YOUR fucking vote so I'll vote however i fucking well please. if people tell me they're voting strategcally, i have a hard time not telling them i want to slap them in the face. the point of a democracy such as ours is to enable the population to cast a vote for who they think is best suited to represent them. obviously if you don't cast your vote for the person who you think is best suited to do that in order to block someone else being elected, you've become a traitor to your own ballot. personally, i think strategic voting should be outlawed because it devalues the concept of a democracy and it devalues your own vote. hi people we live in a multiparty system, so fucking duh, there's a pretty good chance the person you vote for won't be elected but that still doesn't mean you shouldn't vote for them. if you vote strategically you suck.
secondly, if you tell me that you don't want to vote for a certain party because you don't want to vote for the leader, then i will ask you "do you live in the leader's riding? no? then you aren't voting for the leader so fuck off" leaders don't set party policies, party policy makers set party policies. leaders are a face in the crowd. you don't cast a vote for a person, you cast a vote for what policies you think are best suited for you.
now put this and not voting strategically together, and you've got the actual fundamentals of a democracy down.
ignore them, and you're a fucking tool who's spent too much time listening to the analysts on CTV and probably CNN.

so go vote for who you WANT to vote for tomorrow not who people say you SHOULD vote for.

synth muzak for all time

2008-10-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

sick enough to spend the day in bed and sleep and wonder why they still show the really old Just For Laughs from the early 90s that really fucking suck.

oh look, an American geography joke...how original...

had Turkey day on friday cause my sister has to work nights this week. wait..what day is it...i keep thinking it's Monday but it's not is it. now wonder i couldnt find listings for HIMYM and Heros today...no wonder tv is so shitty today...

ive been living off Fresca and OJ today. oh hey there's soe Star Wars CG cartoon on...

oh nuts to that i found he Oilers game.

can you believe there's no soup here?

fun with Tory

2008-10-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

an email i just sent to the Tory candidate for Edmonton-Sherwood Park who's had some past difficulties...

Hello,

I'm going to start out by saying that I've previously worked directly in the House of Commons as well as for the OLO during the last year of the Alliance prior to the merger. I can confidently say that I belong to a certain minority of Canadians who has a well versed, if not a tad cynical, understanding of what actually goes on behind the scenes in Ottawa.
I'll ignore the whole debacle of the method in which Mr. Uppal's riding nomination was secured, as well as the recent discoveries that his financial morals and practices are somewhat questionable. In truth, I'm not the most informed on either of these issues as I'm currently at home in Sherwood Park for Thanksgiving during my reading break from my pursuit of a Master of Public Policy degree at Simon Fraser University.
My question, or comment if you choose to interpret it as such, revolves more around the proceedings and actions of MPs while physically in Ottawa. I'm sure Mr. Uppal has exemplary knowledge of this, as his website certainly makes it sound as such. I'm sure working closely with the CPC and former Alliance party has also given him insight as to what goes on during the majority of the time during proceedings in the House.
During the time I worked in Ottawa, I was frequently disturbed and often disgusted by the manner in which MPs would self-aggrandize, make deals, and act selfishly and entirely not in the interests of those Canadians who they were supposedly representing. I'll not single out a single party for an example as this occured with members from each. This is not representation that a democracy is built around. I'm sure it's easy enough to agree that an MP has a responsibility to act selflessly for the sake of his or her constituents.
I'm also sure that Mr. Uppal has a basic awareness of the general rules of proceedure in the House. This would obviosuly mean he would be aware of the number of MPs required to be rpesent in the Chamber to meet quorum. My first question: if elected, would Mr. Uppal sign an affadavit signifying his intention to inform the Speaker of lack of quorum whenever the number of MPs required are not present. Canadians are well aware of the media circus that is Question Period, but sadly, too few are aware that during debates a pathetically small number of MPs are actually present in the House. I've been present in the Chamber duing debates in which fewer than four MPs are present. If Mr. Uppal will not consent to this if elected, I would consider this an affront to the people of his riding as it shows an unwillingess to assure that Canadians are properly represented.
Secondly, not since the federal election of 1993 has the number of votes cast in Canada by percentage of the population been higher than 50%. The most recent federal election saw voter turnout at 47.2% when considered under the umbrella of total population. I find this more important that the voter turnout rate when measured by percentages of registered voters as the outcome of the election affects all Canadians, and not only those who are registered to vote. In any case, were you to measure this by means of voter turnout, the 36.3% percent the CPC received decreases substantially. MY second question: if elected will Mr. Uppal sign an affadavit to table a motion in the House that seeks to have the election results measured by Votes Cast as the Percentage of the total population, and if found to be under 50%, that the results be considered null and void as a majority of Canadians have not placed their trust in any representative.
Lastly, and directly dealing with our riding of Edmonton Sherwood Park, if elected will Mr. Uppal sign an affadavit signifying his intention to immediately request a by-election should his victory be secured by a total number of votes that is not above 50% of the total votes cast in the boundaries of the constituency. I'm of the mind that a victory in a multiparty system that sees a government put in place with a 36.3% vote rate should not be acceptable, and similarly neither should the population of a riding have their views represented by an individual who wins without securing a majority.
Should I receive a response to these questions that has not come directly from Mr. Uppal himself, I will be visiting his campaign office to make the same requests face to face. Should I be denied this, I will be making a formal complaint to both the CPC as well as Elections Canada.
As for the matter of the potential for these documents to be signed, I've enough contacts in legal business in Edmonton who would be more than willing to draft them up and be present to witness them be signed. I've also a number of contacts both inside the House of Commons as well as a variety of Party offices who will easily be able to inform me of the conditions in the Chamber in regards to m first request.
I take the matter of democratic representation very seriously, as should you, and I find no fault in my requests to ensure proper represenation for Canadians and participation by their MPs in House proceedings.
That said, best of luck in your campaign efforts, and Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.

you're going in the window, yeah you are

2008-10-10T15:31:00.001-07:00

autumn search
Originally uploaded by hkvam

tonight we're having Turkey Night because my sister has to work nights next week.
tomorrow I get to get up at 5am for what I think is one of the few truly sacred things I have. watching the sunrise over a cold farm field and waiting for the day to get started.
everyone has something that's sacred to them, maybe not in a holy sense or whatever, but it's that thing that occupies a place in their mind that can't ever be replaced. i look forward to this for 364 a year.
not everyone understands how a sunrise broken by shotgun shells but they don't have to. it's not theirs to understand. I think that's the good thing about having something important in life that you spend so much time looking forward too, you're really the only person in the world who needs to understand it.

through the eats

2008-10-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

looks like the wireless at YVR is getting better. last time i had about 3/4 signal now it's full.

the line through security is massive, but thats ok cause i have an hour to get through it.

the whole food court place outside of security is under renovation or something. either that or it's a giant quarantine procedure that no one knows about.

SPACE MEAT.

im hoping the west jet people dont give me guff about two carry on bags.

for lack of something better to do i will now go stand in line at security.

see you in 9 days rainy west coat.

*****

i fail to see how doing EVERYTHING that security asks you to do in EXACTLY the way they tell you WITHOUT question and a smile on your face means that out of the 100 people in line IM the one they pull aside and fucking send everything back through the goddamn xray machine. what about the guy who tried to get a litre of fucking soy sauce through? or the women who "oh, well, yes i have some shampoo and this and that..." OR THE DIRTY HIPPIE GUY WHO'S DRESSED IN ALMOST RAGS. FUCK.

and at the risk of sounding like a complete douche nozzle, and i realize that as Canadians we're all happy about multiculturalism, but I'd think that having security people who can understandably speak EITHER OFFICIAL LANGUAGE would be nice.

airports fucking suck. flying is cool, but airports fucking suck.

ready to go off

2008-10-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

live alums are wicked, especially since they give you chance to here what you may have missed, like if you were in south asia all summer and missed a few concerts you'd been drooling over...

that said, the new Matt Good Live at Massey Hall album has made up for that. even if i missed out on the cd pre-order and got booted off the US iTunes store for trying to buy the whole album before the rest of it goes up on the Canadian site...

it makes reading about targeting of income tested welfare programs that much easier to get through.

im only half through it so far, but really, you don't need to listen to the whole thing to already know it'll fucking rule. because it does. rule. fucking. yeah.

back to tapping foot along in the corner and reading.

hollywood panini

2008-10-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

hiking 18km in the rain and snow is always fun. especially when you wear the right boots and dont fuck your feet up. Garibaldi Lake this time. i'm glad that it snowed because it never really felt like october until then.

tired. HIMYM then sleep.

but wait!

2008-10-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

i stumbled on this yesterday night looking up the Yip Yips. i can't believe i've never seen this one before.

try watching it and NOT singing the "I AM CAPTAIN VEGETABLE" part.

can't not do it.

dont forget to not use double negatives.

you must have been out your mind

2008-10-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

ten pages in and i hit the wall. fack. still, that's not too bad considering yesterday i had fuck all done in this draft thing. actually, it's supposed to be a 'progress report' but whatever, it's an initial draft of part of the whole thing.

ive kind of lost track of time so im not sure when i went for lunch but there's this new crepe place in the food court at Harbour Center that Richard and Dany and I hit up and it was pretty goddamn tasty. the dude who owns it is from France and apparently has a tendency to hire hotties as his helpers. of course, i'll be going back for the food...

UUUUUUGGGHHHH i need to not hit the wall ever when i write stuff it sucks cause all i do is sit here for an hour and repetitively flip between websites.

im going for greek food later.

2008-10-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

i should buy a another monitor and keep it in my locker here that i dont really use anymore so i can rock the dual monitors here in the lab and not just at home where i don't actually do as much work. that would make the whole multiple pdf's, word documents and excel sheets open all at once way easier to manage. i have Spaces set up so it's easy enough to go through it all with a keystroke, but still, there's something to be said for just dragging info from one screen to another...

i've been living off of Timmy's breakfasts and A&W dinners for a while. i've already lost track of when the last time i actually cooked my own food was. ok, well yesterday cause i had hotdogs, but before that...

last night i had a serious case of the thesis block. i managed a paragraph in three hours. today i've just about finished the entire draft of my intro section my prof wants in half the time.

except i did not have any pens at all so i had to go all the way down to the bookstore to buy a single fucking pen. do you know how many pens cost more then 4$? a lot. why the hell would you pay 4 or 5$ for a pen? come to think of it, you know what i dont get? when i finished my undergrad a bunch of people gave me pens. those ones in the big boxes with ribbons that you never really open or use. i looked up the lot of them and they average about 60$ per pen. two questions; why do people think that a 60$ pen is a good gift, and why would you spend $60 on a pen in the first place?

just because i can...

DANCE!!

dont park if you cant fuck

2008-10-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

so i walk into the lab this morning and lo and behold there's a BRAND NEW STAPLER sitting up on the shelf at the back of the room.

yes. in my program we get excited over working staplers.

i was in the lab for about 8 hours today. i didnt accomplish what i had set out to do mostly because while i did finish tallying another hospital, the ethics forms took up way more time to fill out than I thought they would.

plus there was the whole, watching the US VP debate...

ok, here's why i didnt watch the Canadian debate, im not voting for any of the leadership candidates, and i dont feel that the format they decided on with the round table discussion is condusive to being really informative. if it was anything like yesterdays french debate, it was most likely a free for all. and while yes, the economy is definitely an important issue, in a 90 minute debate using a full hour of it dedicated to a singular issue doesn't sit right with me. i'd have been much more willing to watch the Canadian debate if the format had gone something like a half hour for each of the economy, the environment and health.

i think a sad fact about most Canadian voters is that they actually think the party leaders are solely responsible for the development of their respective party's policies and platforms. in actuality it's the little bobbing heads behind closed doors that come up with them and hand the papers to the guys in front of the cameras. this is why i dont base my vote on who the leader of a party is.

there was one question in the US debate that I think should have been asked of all the leaders in the Canadian one; what promises in your platforms are you not going to keep?

In this instance Biden was completely forthcoming about what they would take out, while Palin was off in her own little Darn Maverick world Joe. im not sure any of the Canadian leaders would have actually admitted to takign any part of their platforms out but it would have been interesting nonetheless.

during the last federal election i had a green party membership. i bought a year's membership. they still think im a member. they phoned me last week about support and i answered with "i let my membership to the Green party expire, and I will be voting for the individual whose policies and platform I feel will best support and serve the members of the constituency in which I live and not be based on a party leader in whose riding I do not currently reside." green party people on the phone are funny when you answer like that because they get all grumbly as though they can't think of something suitable to say in response.

so far I know im not voting Tory because their tax measures will necessarily result in program cuts to social programs, and I'm not voting Green because their economic policies aren't very sound. Give the Greens another few years to work out the kinks in their platform and they'l have a good shot. Toss up between Liberal and NDP.

im going to go eat brownies now.

2008-10-02T01:38:00.000-07:00

random factoid: in two years, there has yet to be a functioning stapler in a computer lab used by 60 grad students... there are also more computers in the room running Windows 2000 than there are XP.
i totally forgot to mention about the session we had last week with the woman from the library who evidently is the last person we have to deal with before we submit our finished thesis. we were told it would be a helpful session about templates and hints on how to save time in Word.
what we weren't told was that this apparently first takes about ten minutes of being completely derided leaving most of us looking around wondering "what exactly have we done to this woman we have never met before to make her hate us?"
about half our class uses Macs. she spent all of about 30 seconds going over stuff for Mac users because apparently 'we're afraid to abandon our pretty little machines and never want to touch a PC if it looks like we have to transfer files."
im pretty sure everyone in the class who uses a Mac isnt a fucking dunce and knows how to use both and maybe you should try a different tactic other than "if i insult you, i help you."

i have to go to GoldenAge and check on my comics...

also, Shaz pointed THIS AWESOME RENDITION out. you bet your ass i sang it out loud to the tune of the real one. and because it's THAT awesome, here it is again for the umpteenth time on here. NOW SING ALONG.

everybody get on the floor tonight

2008-10-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

so the prelims of this photo exhibition i get to do are coming together nicely. now i need to find a place that'll print 40 or 50 8x10s for not a shitload.
the frames i get to use arent ready until january probably so in terms of dates which i get to pick whenever, I'm thinking January 15th. i dont really know why, it just seems like it should be then.
i have to write up little stories for the pictures i pick for it.
i also have the option of having the framed pictures up on the walls plus running the entirety of the pictures i took in a slide show on a giant 54 inch flatscreen at the same time. pretty sure im gonna omit some of those seeing as how they number in the several thousand...
basically i get to design everything for it that isnt a piece of hardware or a frame.
i already have an idea for the invites. WAY TO GIVE ME SOMETHING TO PROCRASTINATE ON WHILE IM SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING ON MY THESIS.
too bad it's AWESOME procrastination.
gives me something to work on over christmas when i need a break from thesising.
it has been agreed upon in general that out of the people in our hockey pool i have the best team so far. there's already three or four people calling me to win.
Sure Win Five!
i listenened to the sneak preview tracks of the new MG Live album and im pretty sure i peed a little.
i also need to find some data on aggregate noise levels in major cities which i can couple with studies about noise pollution and its effects on quality of life. ideas?

it's still good

2008-10-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

im pretty sure the weirdest dreams are the ones you have after youve woken up once before your alarm goes off and then manage to fall back asleep, but not deep sleep. it's that kind of, "i know im asleep and i know my alarm is going off soon but im still asleep" sleep.

case in point, this morning im pretty sure i had one that involved a discussion of popples with my Comparative Metro Governance prof which then switched to me standing in line waiting to go through a door but i couldnt because my mom phoned me to tell me how excited she was that i was in line for the door.

yeah. i dunno.

what could possibly top a strange dream like that?

i dont know, how about THIS:

boo fuckin yah.

i still think a laugh track would be funny.

hi floor, make me a sandwich

2008-09-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

you know what i find a turnoff? Uggs. i dont understand how chicks think Uggs look good, because they look like really bad slippers. if youre a girl, and you wear uggs, please dont take offence, but really, they aren't that flattering. im pretty sure somewhere out there in the thousands of shoe stores that exist ther has to be some warm shoes that dont look like you wrapped a towel around your feet and walked out of your house. footwear that flows and flatters Good, big ugly fabric boot things, Bad.

anyway.

we had our hockey pool draft tonight. I'd say i have a fair chance at the top four. keep in mind i was 9th out of 11 people. we totally thought more first years would show and make thingsmore interesting, but sadly, they have continued to disappoint in the Hanging Out With the Cool Year thing.

i cant remember the exact order i picked in cause i split my list by position and not by round...

Lundqvist, Chara, Souray, Heatley, St. Louis, Nash, Jokinen, Toews, Tanguay and Sam Gagner.

a 509 message for a blog should have a laugh track. like on a sitcom when they have that laugh when someone does something you know they shouldnt do but they go ahead and do it anyway in a way that's just oh so funny? yeah that kind.

there were only three of us rocking jerseys for the pool tonight. Oilers, Canucks and Leafs. after class today i walked in to the lab to check the address of the pub again and there were like 7 or 8 of the first years sitting in there discussing econ and as soon as i walked in they all looked up, stared and went dead silent. so i was like "why did you all go dead silent" and one girl was like "it was because of your jersey" and i was like "yah it's prety awesome isnt it?"

true story.

i have to meet with the lady who's going to help me organize the photo exhibition tomorrow. looks like it'll happen in January sometime, so i have plenty of time to prep stuff for it.

i also did not know that chocolate whipped cream in a can was not new.

i thought of a quirky title

2008-09-30T00:46:00.000-07:00

today my mail consisted of a brown box, the contents of which were not brown at all. coupled with the awesome new Rocky gloves i picked up today with Mossy Oak Break Up pattern on them, im ready to 'shoot' some wildlife. hah. punny.
Realtree can suck it. Mossy Oak totally rules the world of cammo.
i think this semester is going by far too quickly. next wednesday i fly home for thanksgiving. it seems way too soon for that to be happening so where the fuck did september go?
next week we have to submit the first chunk of our capstone to our thesis supers. so today i sat in the lab and hammered out my comparative metropolitan governance presentation for next week so i dont have to do it this weekend and can instead work on my capstone.
i need a new book to read on the toilet.
today i overheard one of the first years commenting on the days financial meltdown saying something along the lines of "good thing we signed up to be in the public sector and not the private" and i thought "shit, is that what i really signed up for?" and then i mulled and pondered and still am to an extent about going all out for those federal servant jobs that lots of people get when they hit the exit door of this program.
if you'd asked me a year or two ago if i'd like to move back to ottawa i would have said yes. if you asked me now, i'd probably say no. last week in my cities class, my prof asked us if anyone identifies themselves as Vancouverites before Canadians. no one said yes, but not everyone is from vancouver anyway. i know i've always had this thing where i identify as Albertan over much anything else, but i think i can say that at this point i'd be proud to identify myself as a Vancouverite. I'm not an expert on the city by far but i dont think that matters. i doubt a lot of people are. chad once asked me if i thought of Vancouver as home. i think i said something along the lines of home is whereever i feel comfortable. so yes, now i'd say that Vancouver is home.
However, i will still hang up my Alberta flag right next to my Oilers penants because it's the right thing to do.

i have to save a churro and mini doughnuts

2008-09-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

dario has pictures of the day's trek here. the most frightening part of the hike was while sitting under the big chunk of ice my camera fell off a rock while i had the timer on and i thought it was completely fucked cause the front part of the lens was crooked and i thought shit, that's not a good sign, but wouldnt ya know it that sucker popped right back into place and works just fine. well, the auto focus is a little slower now but whatever, it never broke anything so i can live with that.

id like to clarify that in the third video i dont actually want to see a dog jump off the cliff, but there were a shit load people people with dogs up there and prior to me turning on the camera i had mentioned something to the effect that it if a dog who liked to chase squirells was up there it would probably follow it over an edge.

based on the people we passed on the way down, here is a list of things people talk about on hikes:

group of young guys: dog shit

group of young women: apartment hunting and shopping

group of old guys in the shade: who gets the first bite of the white chocolate trail snack

young married couple: getting married

old married couple: young people getting married

group of old ladies: getting married AND young people getting married

group consisting of two married couples: being married and anniversaries

group of Sihks in traditional dress with dress shoes: im not sure, but i bet by the time they get up the hill far enough it would be something along the lines of 'fuck this, im wearing prada."

i'll leave it to you to decide who has the better trail conversation.

im not so much a morning person as much as i used to be, but i have to say that getting up at 6:30 on a sunday and being on the trial head before 8am is probably one of the most awesome feelings ever. especially when you hit the peaks knowing youre probably the first few people all day to set foot up there.

i should get my camera armour tomorrow or tuesday, so if the tentative plan to go for one more hike next weekend is a go, i might bring my D200 along for the ride. if i do i dont want to bring my 16-85, even though it gets better pictures than my 24-100. id rather risk the 24-100 getting smacked on a rock than the 16.

Man Made of Cookie is still the frontrunner.