…OK, you know that boredom is winning when your little game of ‘Hide the FreeCell Window Behind A Spreadsheet Every Time Someone Walks By’ starts to take over your entire day.

Yesterday, I had the unrestrained pleasure of going into a flower store… and picking out a corsage for my brother’s grad date. There is something wrong with this picture, but I’m not quite sure what. (Possibly the fact that I picked out her dress, his tux, and both their shoes. Yeah… yeah, that could be it.) The whole thing reminds me irresistibly of my own grad night, of which I recall exactly the following: a photograph where I look like a cow in a black glitter dress; graduation confetti sprinkled on the tables; and some sort of lit-up fountain. Interestingly, I wasn’t drunk. I just can’t remember a thing. It was that dull. Oh, and I remember one more thing: my family sat with Mark’s family, so they added another two strangers so that the table would add up to 10, and my brother ate one of the strangers’ desserts when she went to the bathroom. Great days, folks. Great days.

So Rob decided to do this great photographic retrospective of his university years. I recommend checking it out (especially the photo of ‘Hotty’ Scott: hubba hubba!). I wish I’d thought to do something like that (oh, and had a digital camera) when I graduated. I would have photographed the idiotically-narrow hallways of the second floor of the humanities building (who designed that building? Eighteen inches is far too small for a hallway), and the eyeball-blasting ugliness of the BioSci main entrance. And I might even have spared a moment to nostalgically photograph the stairwell somewhere in the psych wing of BioSci where I was trapped for forty-five minutes behind two doors that only opened the other way. And I would definitely have photographed CAB. Let’s see… average two hours per day for five days a week, four weeks a month for eight months of every year, for four years is… is… far too much time spent in CAB. No wonder I barely graduated.

Well, this is freakin’ undelightful. My unemployment streak is over - for at least another week and a half, anyway - and it turns out that I’ve got about one hour of work to do per eight-hour day. “Sweet!” you’re thinking. “And they stupidly gave you a computer with internet access!” Stupid indeed. This is boring. I mean, granted they’re paying me for it, but… well… sitting around here for seven hours a day? Even better, it’s, um, ‘Executive Assistants Day,’ or Secretary’s Day for us un-PC folk. So they’ve got a fashion show or something and this place is empty. It’s so empty that I’m… making a blog entry.
In other news, my left lung is still collapsed and it squeaks when I breathe, but I am going to stop complaining about it right now, since the sister of this guy I know got into a car accident and broke her pelvis. She’s going to be on crutches for, like, the next two months. What a little trooper.

OK, so that cold I was whining about? Yeah, that was pneumonia. Today I got long rants from no fewer than three health-care specialists about how I should have been hospitalized from Friday night. They all sounded sort of like “Blah blah, rant rant, next time go to the ER if you so much as sniffle.” (The reason for that last comment was that part of my left lung collapsed sometime during the weekend, or as I like to call it, ‘The Blur.’ ) So now I’m taking this, that, and the other, scheduled for another whack of chest X-rays, and - AND - they gave me a fucking inhaler! I hate this thing. I hate it. Hate hate. Now I know what all you ex-asthmatics were complaining about back when you had asthma. I wholeheartedly take back every ‘pufferhead’ comment I ever made back in my bi-lunged days, honest to God.
So yeah. I kept asking the health-care specialists what exactly it was that I had, and if you add up the three separate verdicts, I had SARS. But, since I hadn’t contacted anyone who already had SARS, I didn’ t, in fact, have SARS at all… despite the textbook-perfect symptoms, including the pneumonia that would have killed me if I were 80. So basically, yeah… spontaneous SARS. Sigh. This body is such a wreck. Anyone wanna trade?

Oh Rob… I thought we had already straightened out the Big Gay Rob thing a long time ago. And for the record, a little bird tells me that I’m supposed to call you ‘Bobert’ now. Catchy!
In other news, just to set the record straight: yes, I am sicker than I have ever been in my life, but no, it isn’t SARS, even though yes, I do have all the symptoms; and finally, yes, my chest does sound like a revving motorcycle every time I inhale, but no, I am not planning on recording the sound and using it in my next production, ‘Nasty Oiled-Up Harley Chicks.’ Wow… it’s taken me fifteen minutes to write this blog entry. I’m going to go consume mass amounts of Tylenol and crawl back into bed now, in case anyone cares. :-(

I’ve been spending the last six months or so drowning in a couple of fat-admirer online magazines - I just can’t seem to help myself. These people are terrifyingly large. We’re not talking a double chin. We’re talking three or four, or no neck. We’re talking people so fat they can’t actually get out of bed. There are personal ads for ‘feeders’ and ‘feedees’ and I will just let youall folks imagine what goes on in the bedroom. It’s not that I want to be a feeder (or, God forbid, a feedee: there’s something slightly sick-making about plastic tubes and pressurized whipped cream), it’s just that their size honestly fascinates me. It’s like a car accident, like looking at a car accident of fat: I can’t look away.
Sites like this, people like this, they are degrading my current notion of my ‘That’s It’ weight. Girls, you probably know what I’m referring to, right? You can only gain so much weight, and then you’re like, “That’s it. Something’s got to be done.” But these people, they don’t have that point. They never get so fat that it gets on their nerves. I’m baffled. I really am. How is this possible? They write weight-gain fantasies. There’s a ‘bodybuilder’ section on one of the sites I visit - no, not giant slick muscles. Giant slick pillows of fat. They’ve got photography classes and special health sections. I can’t tell whether I’m appalled or intrigued. Probably appalled… I borrowed ‘Pilates for Dummies’ a couple of days ago and, despite their ‘idiot-proof’ guarantee, still managed to fracture my spine. Or at least that’s how it feels. By the way, if anyone is thinking of sending sympathy flowers, I like pink roses and red tulips. But not together. That’s just wrong.

So last night I headed off to the unbelievably violent and vacuous ‘The Master Strikes’ at the Metro and laughed till I thought I’d pull something. God, those old kung-fu movies! The plot of this one was especially good - and the main actor is named Casanova Wong. Or rather, the main actor named himself Casanova Wong. I can’t really see his sweaty-faced mother levering herself up on her elbows, somewhere in Xiangji Province, gazing adoringly at her firstborn son and saying, “Hmm, he looks like a ‘Casanova.’”
But at any rate, I got to enjoy ninety-one minutes of eye-poking, table-smashing, scrotum-squishing, beggar-thumping, wine-quaffing, dice-tossing, nose-breaking fun for six bucks. Six bucks! There were a few too many ancient prostitutes and fake mustaches for my taste, but I heartily recommend it. The Kung-Fu Weekend lasts till Monday, folks, so get your asses down there (it’s in the Citadel, so just take the LRT and use the pedways: you don’t even have to go outside!) and emerge feeling spiritually-cleansed and 357% more inclined to start barfights.

In other news, I’m annoyed to report that Corey has fixed his inimitably bad grammar, which thereby forces me to change my comment in the ‘links’ section so as not to misrepresent this. A pity… his motto of ‘Dedicated to you’re needs’ held so many possibilities…

“Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and jacked Mitchell’s dossier. It came on slow; he had time to close his eyes.

Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his eyes… It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a rollercoaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alterations in paradigm and signal system. The data had never been intended for human input.

Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a nightmare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturbing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong…”
William Gibson’s Count Zero, 1986.