Just got back from donating blood, totally giddy with that old altruism high (also the high from losing a lot of blood). This time, I chose everything I ate for two weeks straight based on its iron content (I knew there’d be no point doing it earlier, because my special-needs blood has a hard time holding onto iron). Chili instead of pasta sauce, Ovaltine instead of tea, Cream of Wheat instead of rice pudding, Mini-Wheats instead of Cheerios. Late at night, I could hear my bone marrow churning like a stockcar engine, cranking out more of my pathetically tiny erethrocytes. I practically clanked into the clinic this morning.

Everything was going great, much better than last time – good blood pressure, decent flow (“Your veins are kinda small, hey?” “Shaddup.”), no swooning, no funny stuff, twenty-three minutes. The guy donating across from me had come in with his kids, four year-old twins, who were running around and playing with inflated gloves and generally being free entertainment. So I was watching them and smiling while I held the gauze and didn’t notice that their rapt gaze had gone long beyond friendly curiosity into flat-out horror.

I finally thought to look down at my arm, at almost the exact same moment as the attending nurse, and we both said “!!!” at the saturated gauze and the inch-wide ribbon of blood spooling down my arm. Why hadn’t I felt anything? My only guess is that my arm had gone numb at some point during the session and wasn’t in any condition to notice a creeping body-temperature sensation on my skin. They taped me up (I got to choose the bandage colour and got a little too excited at that) and booted me into the recovery area and gave me a Callebaut brownie from Cookies by George! Did you know that Cookies by George is one of the official suppliers of the Calgary branch of Canadian Blood Services? It was so good. I haven’t had one of those for ages.

I have the most common type of blood in Canada, so they’ve got lots of what I’ve got, but if you’ve got a rare blood type it’s even more important to give. Go donate today! :-)

We need a new planet.

This one is broken.

RUN AWAY!!

Seriously, if you are a boy and reading this, eff off. Go hang out with all the other boys. (And I shall join you in a few minutes.)

So, to my remaining ladies? Big news! After seven years – and actually in large part related to this Valentine’s Day – I have decided to go off the Pill. I looked at the new pack today and suddenly was like, “Jesus! Screw it.”

It occurred to me that I don’t need it for teh sex any more. And my skin, which was the original reason I went on it, will probably be OK – honestly, how bad can it possibly be now? I’m 26, for goodness’ sake. And my major, scary depressive episodes only started after 2000, a few months after I began taking it. And I’m willing to suffer a week of cramps and anemia every month. I’m taking a multivitamin with a lot of iron in it now. If I had asked a magic 8-ball about staying on the Pill, he’d say ‘Signs point to no.’ And that $9 a month can now go towards a couple of Bernard Callebaut milk chocolate bars (with hazelnuts)!

And another thing. Why would I be so leery of screwing up my precious precious neurotransmitters with Remeron, Starnoc, Zopiclone, or etc etc etc yet be perfectly OK with screwing up my hormone levels? Kim, back me up here. With the hormones and the feedback and the precursor molecules and what do they call those proteins that can turn into either one hormone or the other? You know, like cortisol and DHEA? Bah, I should have sat in on more classes. I guess the main thing is that my own body was doing fine for many years, hormonally speaking, until I started adding new junk into the mix.

Anyway, has anyone else out there quit after a long time on the Pill? What should I expect? Will I start with the mood swings? Will I get a blood clot? Is my entire reproductive system going to freak out and leave in the middle of the night and send me a letter the next day asking for its stuff?

So Kim, I’m writing this post more or less especially for you because it would have been a good time for a Kim-Approved Script (TM), and the story goes like this:

I went to Aveda on Monday to book a haircut and wonder of wonders, it wasn’t a two-week wait because someone had cancelled tonight and did I want to come in at 6:30? I would get Valentine chocolates and a free nail treatment! I agreed, of course, and showed up tonight the recommended 15 minutes early, only to discover that my stylist had gotten in a car accident this morning and they were running way behind, so I couldn’t get a substitute stylist tonight before they closed. I sulked, grumped, whined, took a large handful of fair-trade chocolate squares, and stomped off half in tears.

This was a serious disappointment. I started walking home, then abruptly turned around and headed to Eau Claire for the familiar comfort of the candy store therein. As I left out the Good Earth entrance, I noticed one empty bar stool at Joey Tomato’s. The dining room was packed and they had a huge lineup in the vestibule, but who would take one bar stool? Nobody, that’s who. I suddenly decided that my wound was too great for mere ju-jube hearts and malt balls to heal, and I headed into Joey’s and ordered the black forest martini, which for those of you who haven’t experienced it, is pretty much diabetes in a glass; it’s made with more sugar than my entire bag of candy.

The guy next to me – handsome-ish ordinary, half-Chinese, dressed similarly to me in a graphic tee and dark jeans, banged his fist on the bar. And we had the following conversation (you’ll have to imagine the shouting over the very, very noisy restaurant).

Guy: I…
Me: Sorry?
Guy: I fucking HATE Valentine’s Day.
Me: ME. TOO.
Guy: All these couples! On the street -
Me: Practically –
Guy: FUCKING. On the STREET.
Me: LIKE ANIMALS.
Guy: YES.
Me: It’s DISGUSTING.
Guy: WE. Should do a SHOT.
Me: YES WE SHOULD. (I hurriedly drained my martini and shoved the empty glass away.)
Guy: HEY. HEY. Give us two shots of Sambuca.
Me: I hate Sambuca.
Guy: Me too. But it’s OK, because –
Me: BECAUSE WE HATE VALENTINE’S DAY TOO.
Guy: EXACTLY.

We got our shots and drank our shots and retched a little bit and clinked our empty glasses in a slightly-belated toast to singlehood, and then we whined for a while about being single, and then, dear readers, guess what happened? It’s a multiple-choice question, so you have a one-in-three chance to get it right.

a) We had one more shot, then threw our arms around each other’s necks and jammed our tongues down one another’s throats.
b) We had one more shot, then I looked down and saw his pride bracelet.
c) We had one more shot, then he paid, got up, and left.

Answer below, highlight to read:

C, obviously. I told you I put out an anti-man field. Anyone else want to argue?

Amusingly, this year I couldn’t decide what I wanted my Valentine’s focus to be. So I ended up writing three separate posts, which you now get all in one as a special VD present!

Post 1:

So sad, another Valentine’s Day to be spent at home wrapped in a blanket watching anti-romance movies (Akira?). But what’s a girl to do? All my Valentines are out of the running.

David Duchovny’s married to a skinny actress.
David Bowie’s married to a skinny model.
David Hyde-Pierce is ‘gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.’
David Attenborough is way, way out of my league.
David Spade is a twat.
David Bannion is too fictional.
David Hasselhoff is too fuzzy.
David Gordon’s got that attitude problem.

Am I missing any Daves?

Bah. Screw ‘em.

Which leads us to:

Post 2:

Oh joy, another Valentine’s Day. The best holiday! Because it’s the only holiday centered entirely around an emotion! What could be better than a day all about randomly-produced squirts of hormones and neurotransmitters spurred reflexively by the prospect, nay, the mere thought of getting some punani! Oh help, I’m drowning in sarcasm.

I was fairly ambivalent about Valentine’s Day whilst part of a long-term couple, and I think the guy sensed that, so we never made a big deal out of it. But single? Suddenly I hate it. I hate the holiday and everything it stands for (except my mother’s yearly Valentine package – I don’t hate that). And the whole single thing is giving me an ulcer, never mind what I commented on Solange’s VD entry. An ulcer, I tell you!

And why might that be? Very simple: cognitive dissonance between where I feel romance fits on the general evolutionary scale and where it fits for me specifically. Observe: I read many blogs, linked from friends of friends of friends of friends, and inevitably you’ll end up on the feel-good blog of the year, which is inevitably written by a nine-hundred pound leper who also has, say, alopecia, rabies, ringworm, fifteen extra fingers, and dissociative identity disorder. (And nothing feels better than someone else’s misery, am I right?) So I’m reading through the archives and chuckling smugly at her struggles with the family of possums living under her bed, or having an entire team of doctors simultaneously vomit on her during an examination, or how a huge hank of dandruffy hair just fell onto the special polydactyl keyboard. Hahaha! Awesome!

Then of course you always, and I mean always, come across the wedding pictures. Wedding pictures? What the fuck? But yes, there’s a four-carat Tiffany ring with pave setting underneath all that knuckle hair, and the husband happens to be a strapping Greek stud who wins the lottery every two weeks and spends his free time rescuing drowning kittens and practicing tantric gymnastics. And they always live on a fabulous acreage in the San Fernando valley where it rains ponies and sapphires and they go out every morning to rake up the bounty the money tree shed overnight on the front lawn.

So she – arguably amongst the less attractive humans on the planet – has a man. Of course. And I didn’t think I was that bad, but I’m single, so I must be, mustn’t I? Logically. I must in some fundamental way be worse than her. My singlehood is the evidence of that. My prolonged, parental-worrying, apparently immovable singlehood. Sweet fancy Jesus, I hate it when the worst possible conclusion is the only right one.

On the other hand…

Post 3:

Every year that I’ve been away for Valentine’s Day, my mom sends me a care package. I think the first year it was some heart-themed undies and socks, and I squealed with delight and went running around my two-hundred square foot apartment. (That lasted about two seconds, yes.)

But this year? The woman outdid herself. I went to the post office to pick up what I assumed would be a fairly small package, and ended up wrestling this huge sack of goodies home. Just outstanding.

Two fancy camisoles from La Senza!
An aromatherapy neck pillow!
A box of swanky Vitamin-C fruit chewies from Florida!
A fancy, black-and-white striped belted dress shirt!
Two movie passes!
Two bags of my favourite candy in the entire world: Purdy’s raspberry hearts!

And, the kicker: this Valentine card! (click for larger)

Inside, inside it says ‘Hope fun and adventure are swinging your way!’ I guess she noticed the Spiderman action figure that guards my fridge (what? Shut up). So how cool is that? I have the best mom ever. That more or less completely makes up for a) her incessant nagging about my unhealthy singlehood, and b) my unhealthy singlehood. Who needs a boyfriend when I get gifts like this from family?

“In the Pampaean deposit at the Bajada I found the osseous armour of a gigantic armadillo-like animal, the inside of which, when the earth was removed, was like a great cauldron; I found also teeth of the Toxodon and Mastodon, and one tooth of a Horse, in the same stained and decayed state. This latter tooth greatly interested me*, and I took scrupulous care in ascertaining that it had been embedded contemporaneously with the other remains; for I was not then aware that amongst the fossils from Bahia Blanca there was a horse’s tooth embedded in the matrix: nor was it then known with certainty that the remains of horses are common in North America. Mr. Lyell has lately brought from the United States a tooth of a horse; and it is an interesting fact, that Professor Owen could find in no species, either fossil or recent, a slight but peculiar curvature characterizing it, until he thought of comparing it with my specimen found here: he has named this American horse Equus curvidens. Certainly it is a marvellous fact in the history of the Mammalia, that in South America a native horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after-ages by the countless herds descended from the few introduced with the Spanish colonists!

* I need hardly state here that there is good evidence against any horse living in America at the time of Columbus.”

- Charles Darwin, ‘The Voyage of the Beagle.’

I love this man. Love. He’s in Patagonia, he hasn’t eaten for three days, the water in all the local wells is saline, he’s got saddle-sores, his guides are getting ready to desert, there’s pumas everywhere, and he leaps off his horse to go running around in the cliffs screaming “Horse tooth! Horse tooth!”

Happy Darwin Day, everyone!

(Note before I start: I would really like to see what kind of spam gets caught in the filter after a title like that.) (Note 2: This also isn’t the planned ‘serious’ post, I’m putting that one off indefinitely.)

Anyway, read this and then come back here. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, it’s about a British dude jailed in Dubai. Why? For possession: a speck of marijuana about the size of a grain of sand stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

When I read this story I said some very unladylike things. My first reflex was to call my mom and say, “God, it’s happened again!” Because last year, this happened to my family. One of my British cousins, who’s a buyer for a high-end department store over there, had done a buying tour of the Middle East and was arrested and promptly jailed in Dubai for possession of marijuana. It was about one-half of one leaf, in a pocket of one of the approximately 800 pairs of jeans – in a wooden box marked with the distributors’ name – he had purchased. His name was on the paperwork. So it was his marijuana. Zero point zero two grams of it. And there he was in a Dubai jail.

Everyone in the family freaked out. Zero tolerance for drugs is one thing, but this cousin happens to be gay too. We didn’t know at the time what Dubai did to gay prisoners, but knowing the penalties in some other countries down there, there didn’t seem to be any good reason to calm down. Thank God the company stepped in, as well as a family friend who works for the UN, and my cousin was released more or less intact in November. I understand he still hasn’t spoken about his experience over there, but that’s fine with us – we’re just happy he’s back in civilization.

Things like this just make me want to nuke the entire region. Just nuke it into radioactive glass and throw a party afterwards. My feelings towards the Middle East used to range from mild annoyance and headshaking “Well, idiots will be idiots,” to anger at the prevailing philosophies on womens’ and gay rights, to weeping at the destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas, to hysterical rage at everything about the entire region. Everything I read about it now makes me mad. I haven’t read one positive thing about it since I can’t remember when. Now please pardon me while I go scream into a pillow.

I don’t know why I’m so violently opposed to doing memes, usually. I mean, there’s literally millions out there, why haven’t I found that many I like? Anyway, here’s one that’s almost as random as those MASH things we used to do in grade 3 (don’t lie, you did them too). And I’m bored and my next planned post is so serious. I’m not using my ‘music player’ – I’m using my Late-Night Playlist in the Foobar music player on my computer.

Put your music player on shuffle.
Press forward for each question.
Use the song title as the answer to the question even if they don’t make sense.

How am I feeling today?:
Orbital – Frenetic
What the hell. OK, that’s not bad. Moving on…

Will I get far in life? (My note: Oh, come on. These kind of yes or no questions are totally impossible to answer with a song)
Swollen Members – RPM
So I’ll get far in life if I… spin very fast? Insert appropriate Simpsons quote here, from alien presidential election.

How do my friends see me?:
Air – Casanova 70
LOLOLOLOL (falls off chair, dies). You’d think I was rigging this thing. Next…

Where will I get married?
Lamb – Hearts and Flowers
So, uh… where do we have hearts and flowers… err, La Senza? Damn.

What is my best friend’s theme song?:
Ben Harper – Mama’s Got a Girlfriend Now
(bursts into tears of laughter) That’s so good! It really is music player ESP! Holy Toledo.

What is the story of my life?:
Massive Attack – Protection
Eh? No, I’m not feeling it. Protection from what? Against what? Maybe it’s referring to my extremely protected first 23 years of life?

What was highschool like?:
Swollen Members – Heavy Thinkers
Oh sure. With the fake accents and the yearbook committee and the pitching necklaces across a room and the “Watch out, Timmy!” Maybe it isn’t really ESP after all.

How can I get ahead in life?:
Swollen Members – Bring It Home
Bring what home? Bring myself home? Bring a man home? Bring a stray cat home? Buy a house? Please explain!

What is the best thing about me?:
Michael Nyman – The Truth (Gattaca soundtrack)
It’s a lovely thought and a lovely piece but probably not. For, as is well known, I lie like a fly. 24/7. I lie in my dreams. I even lie in my internal monologue. Nope, nope, nope.

What is tomorrow going to be like?
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – And No More Shall We Part
Well, that’s interesting. I have a one-on-one ‘mock’ interview with a wildly handsome consultant at my career management place tomorrow at 1. He looks like Richard Gere just after admitting to the tantric sex thing. Rowr.

What is in store for this weekend?:
Morrissey – I Like You
I like you too, Mozzer. Uh, next?

What song describes my parents?:
Marcus Roberts – In A Mellow Tone
Eh?

How is my life going?:
Chemical Brothers – Marvo Ging
Marvo Ging? I don’t get it. Does anyone get that?

What song will they play at my funeral?
Lamb – Till The Clouds Clear
Oh! Actually, that would be seriously perfect. But I’m not willing to admit credibility to this thing yet.

How does the world see me?:
Morrissey – November Spawned A Monster
Oh, thanks a lot.

Will I have a happy life?:
Def Leppard – Let’s Get Rocked
So that’s a yes! Awesome! Yay!

What do my friends really think of me?: (My note: Aha, so the other one was just a red herring! This is what my friends really think of me)
Michael Nyman – I Thought You Wanted to Dance (Gattaca soundtrack)
I do, I do! But you guys never ask me!

Do people secretly lust after me?:
Crowded House – It’s Only Natural
Hahaha! That’s not bad. I didn’t see my hotness as a given till now.

How can I make myself happy?:
Nat King Cole – These Foolish Things
Hey, this isn’t bad… he gives you a list in the song! I’ll need a cigarette with some lipstick traces, and an airline ticket to romantic places.

What should I do with my life?:
Morrissey – Interesting Drug
Oh… OK. I’ll see what I can do to get hooked on something ‘interesting.’ Perhaps laudanum or peyote.

Will I ever have children?:
Crowded House – A Mansion in the Slums
Stupid yes/no questions. Honestly.

What is some good advice for me?:
Air – Kelly Watch the Stars
For me, I said! For me! I want a do-over for this one.

How will I be remembered?
Def Leppard – Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad?
Oh, come on. Come on.

What is my signature dancing song?:
Swollen Members – Bad Dreams
As if. Everyone knows that my signature dancing song is ‘Play That Funky Music.’

What is my current theme song?
Michael Nyman – Irene’s Theme
Oh, fuck you. That’s not even funny. Next!

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?:
Swollen Members – Therapy
Hahaha! I weep with laughter. No I don’t. Though that was kind of freaky.

What type of men/women do you like?
Morrissey – Yes, I Am Blind
Oh, I don’t know; I’ve never really given a blind guy a chance. (Colour-blind, once. Blind, no.) I don’t think they’d like me, though. Even a blind guy can tell when someone’s fat and nuts and evil.

So, there. Everyone else is going to have to try it now. I’m off to shave my legs for tomorrow’s interview, because you never know. (Wink, wink.)

After David Bowie, David Attenborough, Martin Amis, and Terry Pratchett (oh, and you too Mr. Kelly), my favourite Englishman in the world is Stephen Fry. I can’t believe I’ve been reading his blog for how many months and haven’t updated my blogroll till now.

I liked him in Jeeves and Wooster and in the Blackadder series and in the Gormenghast miniseries (a true scene-stealer, though he didn’t look anything like Peake’s description, don’t you think?) and in that show he did with Hugh Laurie (whom I also adore, but I assume it’d be jarring to see him on ‘House’ with an American accent so I haven’t bothered watching him in that). Then I made the mistake of buying one volume of Fry’s autobiography, ‘Moab Is My Washpot,’ and just fell head over heels in love. (Which is typical of my taste in men since he’s gay and bipolar.)

The blog continues to surprise me in that it’s usually about fun gadgets or his filming adventures or etc, rather than about acting or writing. Go check it out, and prepare to swoon!

Final thought for the day: the cold’s escalated into a bugger of an infection again – this time I know to listen for the soft ugly roar of liquid in my lungs, rather than the ordinary sickly rattle of a bad cold. Mother of mercy! They said this would keep happening, but seven months later? What gods have I pissed off recently? I’m going to go suck on my inhaler for a while, have a cup of tea, and drink some Nyquil to knock the fever down. Other suggestions welcome.

(Also if you happen to know of any ways I can propitiate the gods that’d be really good too. Thanks.)