I would like to send out an appeal to all the stuff I’ve lost in the last three weeks, including my elderly and beloved TI-82 calculator, my even more beloved honours ring, my Roots toque, a gym shirt that says PERFECT 10 on it, all my tax information, a copy of my favourite Terry Pratchett novel, my OneCard, and a binder containing the notes for my two hardest classes. Oh, and before anyone asks whether I was robbed again, the answer is no: I think I’m just going insane. Everything was lost in completely separate incidents. It’s become an interminable running gag, day after day of journal entries starting with “Can’t find my __________, think I’ve probably lost my mind.” So, stuff – this is for you.

Ahem. (Taps microphone.) Test. Check. Test, test.

“Whatever I said, whatever I did I didn’t mean it
I just want you back for good (want you back) (want you back) (want you back for good)
Whenever I’m wrong, just tell me the song and I’ll sing it
You’ll be right and understood

Unaware but underlined I figured out this story
It wasn’t good (no, no) (wasn’t good)
But in the corner of my mind (corner of my mind) I celebrated glory
But that was not to be
In the twist of separation you excelled at being free
Can’t you find (can’t you find?) a little room inside for me

Whatever I said, whatever I did I didn’t mean it
I just want you back for good (want you back) (want you back) (want you back for good)
Whenever I’m wrong just tell me the song and I’ll sing it
You’ll be right and understood

And we’ll be together, this time is forever
We’ll be fighting and forever we will be
So complete in our love
We will never be uncovered again

Whatever I said, whatever I did I didn’t mean it
I just want you back for good (want you back) (want you back) (want you back for good)
Whenever I’m wrong just tell me the song and I’ll sing it
You’ll be right and understood

I guess now it’s time, that you came back… for good.”

The Metro downtown was playing the Best of Ottawa Animation Festival 2006 this weekend, so I went on Friday and was generally thrilled and charmed and entertained for the modest price of six bucks. Of course, as with any film festival, there were a couple of duds – the ‘Lightning Doodle Project’ nearly gave me a seizure, and ‘Crossing the Stream’ was a trial for everybody involved – but on the whole, plenty of fun stuff. ‘Tyger’ had me pinned to my seat with my mouth open, and I think it was the favourite of the girl who reviewed it in the Edmonton Journal, yet it sounds so stupid if you try to summarize it, so I won’t try here.

The funniest short was probably a music video done for Jason Forrest called ‘War Photographer’ and my favourite short was this, ‘Who I Am and What I Want’ by two apparently crazy British filmmakers. The hermit narrator, Pete, is a fan of attractive habits like shooting arrows into people’s buttocks, biting the heads off birds, and eloquently discussing who he is and what he wants. At the end he says, “And I don’t want to live in a herd of twats who want to make me wear clothes and eat with a knife and a fork.” He also wants to be water-soluble so when he goes water-skiing and falls, he’ll dissolve before the sharks eat him. Truly, the modern man.

Saturday was the well-publicized ‘Fiesta in Leduc,’ which got my thumbs-up as parties go – good company, plenty of eats, and, wait for it, a pinata! I didn’t hear who brought it, but it was a damn fine pinata. It’s not too often that you get ones with Laffy Taffy and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera out for most of the night, but I did haul it out when Mike did the pinata up Stephen Chow-style, as per below:

I especially like Julie clapping in the background, which adds that extra little touch that means so much. The only downside was that the Oilers got trounced by the Flames. (Not a personal downside, of course. I don’t have much room in my heart for hockey given that basketball takes up so many chambers. Luckily, our hosts decided to do the pinata after the hockey game was over so that the candy would cheer everyone up.)

So yeah, a solid weekend, all in all. Oh, and Martin Amis has a new book coming out! I believe it’s called ‘House of Meetings,’ which already sounds more promising than his surprisingly-bad ‘Yellow Dog.’ Granted that since my bank account is on the verge of dwindling to two digits any day now, I won’t be able to buy it in hardback… but if I can just hold out another couple of months, I may have enough money left over from paying exorbitant rent in Calgary to buy it in paperback.

Oh hell, who am I trying to fool. I’m going to go into the U of A bookstore tomorrow afternoon and pick up a copy. I’d read a grocery list if Martin Amis wrote it.

Update: OK, so I finished and posted this entry, and reached back into my bag to get my celphone and discovered, at the bottom, in fact stuck to my planner… a sticky, half-dried-up lime slice.  Many a question mark is now floating around my head.  WTF?

I got my skull!  And comments work again!  I lost a couple, but otherwise the theme upgrade seemed to go OK.  And then I got a really upsetting e-mail and also lost all my links and even my WordPress login link, so I was just about to write an angry angry post when the phone rang and oh my God, my cousin Cindy had her baby this afternoon and my heart just flooded onto the floor.  My cousins were responsible for eight babies last year, too many to keep up with, but Nathan Rahaman (six pounds, four ounces) certainly deserves a post of his own for being the first.  Welcome to the world, Nate!

Special shout-out to Solange and Jocelyn: I think your comment may have gotten deleted in the upgrade, but don’t worry, I read and absorbed it thoroughly, and you guys are totally, totally right.

On the plus side, at least they seem to like gay people…

Update:  Um, I broke comments.  In fact… the only thing that seems to be working on the blog right now is posts.  This is why change is bad.

So, I changed my theme because the ‘Girls Suck’ theme was getting old (actually, it was old from day one – hooray for procrastinating!) and now my new theme isn’t showing the picture in the header. It’s a dinosaur skull. A Tyrannosaurus, I think – or maybe an Allosaur. I don’t know why it’s not showing. It may be six months before we can answer the greatest of all life’s questions: “Where’s my skull?”

:-(

Update: Several fruitless minutes later, I am giving up on the new theme till I figure out how to get the picture to show.  And it also deleted my list of links… so I have to figure that out too.

Bugger.

It is so thrilling when you meet an online friend and they are exactly the way you hoped they’d be, or even better. Meeting Crazy White Girl was so fantastic that I expected about the same from meeting Von, and was not disappointed in the slightest. We had lunch at DaDeO’s on Whyte Ave last Thursday (mmmm… fried-oyster po’boy) and spent the afternoon shopping and venting and hooting with laughter about every ten seconds. It’s funny, too, how reading blogs gives you a sense of entitlement to ask about deeply private things. I think the second thing I said after I sat down at the restaurant was “OH MY GOD. Are you okay? When’s Jesse moving out? How are you holding up?

Near the end of the day I took this picture, obviously, because it’s been taken seven thousand times before.

When I got home, I checked out the dating site she had recommended and wrote down two handles and then thought, “Whaaaat the hell are you doing?” and ripped the index card into weeny little pieces, then sat there for about ten minutes with a finger upraised and my mouth open as if I were arguing with the Invisible Man.

What the hell was I doing? It seems pretty innocuous, doesn’t it. But what’s so wrong with being single? What does being in a relationship actually prove, especially if it’s a sick liasion of minds and not hearts anyway? The thinking (I’m going on pure speculation here) goes that if I am part of a couple, then I am indisputably valuable – worth somebody’s love and time and attention. And, couplehood is a testament to my ability to find and retain an appropriate person who will give me these things and accept them graciously from me in return. And, it means my chance for a Standard Future is higher than a singleton’s – I might, as part of a couple, get the kids and the plasma TV and a stucco house with a big sloping lawn that in a certain light looks a little bit like a mental institute.

But single means I’m a second-class citizen, not a lone wolf, not the Stranger from ‘High Plains Drifter,’ and also not a nun, a hermit, an explorer, or any other conventional single thing to be. A couple has status, a couple is having a backup, a second self, all that good shizz. So it would seem on the surface that there’s nothing off about trying to find someone and be part of a couple again.

(Yeah, so it would seem, and the logic? seems fine, looked at objectively. Still I shy away from the idea. It strikes me as not merely disloyal, but actually traitorous, plus desperate, plus greedy – doubletripleplus greedy. I have a home, an upcoming job, food on my table, plenty of stuff coming at me through the interweb, awesome friends, relative sanity, not too many scars, reasonable health, numerous BBC nature documentaries, and the occasional night’s sleep without a bad dream – and after this total embarrassment of riches, I want a man, too? Blecchh. It’s a sin and I don’t even believe in sin. It’s completely a sin.)

New plan: not think about boys at all for four months, try to survive six classes plus yoga, ignore the money situation (damn you, St. Albert Transit!) and wait for the planet to swivel back around to spring. Done? Done.

Postscript: here is what you boys are missing out on – the kind of girl who gets this kind of picture taken while proclaiming “UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN BABY, AW YEAHS, NINETEEN AND OH-SEVEN!”

Crazy like an X-ray laser.

Happy New Year, all! I don’t know about you, but my 2006 was really on-again off-again (mostly off), so I’ve got mighty high hopes for 2007. My Chinese horoscope for the year says “Rooster will be at the feast, but pig is modest and rooster enjoys strutting. Conservative pig has little patience for rooster’s emotional displays. In the pig year it is best to work on compromise. The rooster will worry about his seat at the table. Don’t be foolish. Stop worrying and enjoy the party. Good fortune comes to the rooster who can copy the pigs steady pace. This does not come easy to the proud rooster and you will find that success this year takes more work. Business may suffer small problems, but a steady pig approach to completing tasks and following through on plans will bring rewards.”

Based on this gobbet of wisdom, my New Year’s resolutions are to 1. Stop worrying and enjoy the party, and 2. Copy the pig’s steady pace. I think that sounds pretty doable. In fact, I even started on #1 before 2007 hit, by enjoying last night’s New Year’s Eve-cum-Late-Wedding-Reception shindig at the Cardiff Community Hall.

Yes, this photo was taken before everyone got sauced. The reason we look so dippy is that two cameras actually took this shot, almost simultaneously, thus Kim and I looked at one camera and Solange and Jocelyn looked at the other one. Coordination, people, coordination is key. (The other photo turned out even worse.)

Sensei and Grasshopper, a few seconds after midnight. I am annoyed that I have severe blue-eye and Ryan has severe red-eye despite using the red-eye reduction setting on my camera. Still a few bugs to work out, obviously. Also possessing a few bugs to work out is the three-step program to becoming the new Ryan, which is all about timing, apparently. You have to get drunk, get handsy, and get gross, but the last two steps have to be done very very close together, occasionally even to the extent of suddenly getting gross onto the person you’re getting handsy with. I only got as far as step one. So much to learn…

On Friday, I was able to get a few shots at the New Xmas party hosted at Casa Gordon y LeBlanc.

Three cheers for our gracious hosts, ladies and gentlemen, aren’t they a couple of wunnerful domestic divas. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Ms. LeBlanc will post lots of piccies on her blog, but I thought I had to put up this one. We played a fun game called ‘Hide the Sausage.’

Which is short for ‘Hide the Sausage Rolls in the Oven and Get Distracted By Cheese.’ The sausage rolls were looking a little raw on the top initially, so Kim and I suggested Solange turn the oven to broil for a little while, and then we shut our brains off completely. Twenty minutes later people were looking around and sniffing warily, and when we checked on the sausage rolls the smoke alarm went off – lots of running around with towels, lots of fingers in the ears, etc, etc. And we were all the sadness, and had to drown our sorrows in Mai Tais and White Russians. But the moral of the story is, damn you, delicious cheese!

All in all, a fun couple of days; I’m refreshed and rejuvenated from the health-giving effects of all that alcohol and laughter and getting dry-humped on the dance floor, and I’m ready for a new semester. Good job, team!