I just got the audio version of my second-favourite book ever, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ The book is partly garbage, I admit, but the 40% or so that isn’t just makes me shiver. Every time I read it I feel as if genius is a hand and it’s grabbing my face so I can’t breathe.

I am only telling you guys this to explain why I won’t be on-line, or picking up the phone, or indeed going to school for a couple of weeks.

It is forty-two hours and eleven minutes long. That’s why. I can’t hardly wait.

Actually, that title is a bit of a lie. I’ve never been a bridesmaid. The majority of my close friends - the ones close enough to ask me to be a bridesmaid - are guys. One of them once asked me to be a bridesmaid, but when I pointed out that I didn’t know the bride and would be better off in the groom’s party, we got into a big fight. I suggested I be a ‘bridesman’ or a ‘groomsmaid,’ but those were vetoed and eventually I was out of the wedding party altogether.

At any rate, I’m bridesmaiding for the very first time next August. I have been frightened since the moment I was asked. I went to a bridal show today at the Shaw that did very little to alleviate my fear. One reason to be frightened: bridesmaid’s dresses.

Sometimes I really wish I were a boy.

Boy, I’m sure glad I live in nice, safe, landlocked, middle-of-a-tectonic-plate Alberta. Hurricane Ivan is thrashing the living piss out of everything in the Caribbean as I write this; half a million people are already being evacuated from low-lying areas of Jamaica. (One wonders where these people are being evacuated to. It’s not an especially big island.) 90% of Grenada, the so-called ‘Spice Island,’ has been levelled to the bare dirt. I have an uncle who lives there, and one cousin; two more cousins are currently in Trinidad, which was a recent entrée on Ivan’s ‘Eat The Entire West Indies’ menu. I’m worried about Grenada, though. We can’t get ahold of anyone. The airports are apparently mud soup, electricity and communication has been cut off, several inmates have escaped from their laughably-archaic prison, and looters are being attacked with tear gas.

Those poor, spicy, soggy Grenadians. Pray for the Caribbean, mon. :-(

I wish I were spending my birthday with my buddies on Mirko’s balcony in Calgary overlooking the Bow River and the Space Science Center.

However, I am clearly not. Somebody please come and put me out of my misery.