back - to - back - to - back - to - back - to - back

Everything you ever wanted to know about working split shifts in a bar goes something like this: get up real early in the morning and come home about sixteen or so hours later.

Oh, and for about an hour in there somewhere you actually get the chance to sit down and think about killing yourself.

wide asleep

I'd tell you what had me so freaked out this morning, but writing about dreams is like playing baseball in a bathtub.

fore! fore! fore! (or, I don't know why I didn't post this sooner)

Give a girl a little paranoia and she'll go a long way to make good use of it.

Consider the case of a co-conspirator of mine assistant producing TSN's coverage of the LPGA in Halifax a couple weeks ago.

Now for myself, golf carts are fun. For my friend, the golf cart is a menacing machine of potential doom.

When you put a nervous girl like this behind the wheel, sometimes bad things happen, like for instance, a fucking collision.

Golf cart brakes aren't really that capable of fast stops -- case in point -- my girlfriend (who will remain nameless for the sake of her own shame) slammed on the brakes just as an unassuming senior moseyed into her imminent path. She hit him despite her pretty fast reaction. Clipped the unfortunate guy maybe is a better way to say it.

In her defense, the whole thing happened off the beaten trail -- in the rough on a steep slope -- where the traffic was directed far out of the players' way. Sixteen-thousand spectators and golf carts squeezed into the rough on a steep slope? Right.

So the guy turned out to be pro-golfer Kim Adams' Dad -- she had clubbed that little white ball off the fairlane. Boy, was she ever mad, and not just cause she was sucking. Furious. Furious enough to shove my poor-driving scared little friend. Kim got in her FACE. Her jaws were clenched and her words got vicious.

The 'incident' was all over the media the next day.

The funniest thing about the entire escapade was sports-journalism's complete disregard for fact. They just asked around and reported whatever.

"God, did you hear Kim Adams' Dad got knocked unconscious by a speeding golf cart?"

I actually did hear that one. Moron.

So here's an example from Canadaeast.com.

"Adams watched in shock as a tournament volunteer suddenly backed a golf cart into [her father].

He was knocked to the ground and suffered lacerations to his hand, wrist and elbow."

(Can I also just mention here that Canadaeast.com actually mispelled cart [curt], and I had to edit this for them? See for yourself.)

Oh dude, we didn't back into you, you walked in front of our moving cart on a steep embankment. And don't pretend your glasses flying off and that scrape on your shin count as suffering or 'lacerations.' Holy shit. Boo-fucking-hoo. At the time, I was more scared your daughter was going to punch my friend in the neck.

Luckily, after some shaken nerves and some tears, we laughed off the whole to-do and the story is now going down in infamy.

I love you TSN, for letting me be a part of the wonderful world of golf, and for trusting four young girls with the keys to a fleet of golf carts.


Geez, she just wanted to play golf.
Image courtesy canadaeast.com

Daniel MacIvor tells us like we are

I found a script where I'd taken down word for word a lot of the director's notes...

"You can't be philosophical about your life when you're in it."

Vomitous, vomitous! - you need to get your shit together bitch."

"What, is that turtleneck like - strangling you? And cutting off the circulation to your BRAIN!?"

"We're human beings, not human doings. When in doubt, just be."

yip yip yip

You can wade in a stream of consciousness and still be blind; boys on fourwheelers shooting off pellet guns can feel like home if you just allow them to.

breaking of a wave can't explain the sea

Single as I am, I don't necessarily miss having someone close. It's the ardent sex I miss. The really carnal stuff you just can't have without some emotion. You can have the lay without the passion, but you can't have the mind-blowing fuck without the fierce intensity.

Sometimes I get so desperate missing it, I claw at the showerhead until waves of release break over me. Yeah. In the shower. Groan. I'm not very imaginative at all without the fervent inspiration of a smoking-gun spirit.

So I'd rather put off the potential lays waiting for the really great fucks.

I want explicit beauty. I want smoldering rapture.

no dial tone

Cause I was a slight pissed off, and because I had to get a more concrete perspective (see this post), I dropped off my looks-like-I-know-nothing bar resume -- not my nice curriculum vitae -- at another call center.

They called to offer me a job the very same day.

pretty girls don't join the army

I stumbled into a camera store in Brunswick Square, Saint John today. I think I let out a low whistle looking at the camera I'd love to own.

My credit rating ain't so hot though. This isn't because I suck at paying bills (albeit a slight factor), but because I really don't own anything the bank could take from me if I forfeit payments and descend into creditor hell. I have nothing except this computer. I also can't prove that I actually make money, because I work in a bar (mental note: stop drinking your tips).

OK. Breathe. This is temporary. I'll eventually find something more than freelance in journalism (I hope) or acting (fat chance), maybe make some actual cash (don't quit your night job) and maybe buy my camera (holy fuck I really want that to happen).

In the meantime I'm carrying around a disposable, snapping whatever, whenever.

Today's temp-camera adventure led me to the public washroom in Market Square. I set the disposable cam down on the toilet paper dispenser as I sifted through my purse looking for the elusive tube of gloss.

Totally mesmerized by the discovery of forgotten receipt after forgotten receipt stuffed into hidden purse pockets (these add up to about as much money as I wish I had right now), I walk out of the stall without the camera.

Not even two minutes later, post hand wash and walk-out, I zip back into the washroom and find the stall freshly occupied.

"Hello?? [I rap my knuckles against the metal door] Hi in there? Hi, is there a camera in there? I think I left my camera, do you see a disposable camera in that stall?"

A muffled sing-song voice instantly breaks the cacophony of flushes.

"NO. There's NO camera in here."

Pause.

I'm shot down.

Kkkkkkkuuuuuusssssslllllllupppssshhhh (a sink fills).

I don't know what to say except what comes out of my mouth -- "but, but that's um, I left one in there, did someone take it?"

Two women I don't know turn towards me on their way out the door and raise their eyebrows at my disbelief.

"I was just in there," says the one with the most arched brows, "there was a camera. It was on the toilet paper thing."

As she confirms what I know is absolutely true, the washroom goes a little silent and I turn my body slightly, tilting my head so I can just see through the pencil-sized space in between the door of the stall and the stall frame.

What I see (or rather, witness) is the top of a dirty-blonde head and an extraordinarily fat hand reaching down into a big open brown purse on the floor. But it's not any of that I really notice -- I really notice what the hand is reaching for -- my very own, very used disposable camera is in fatty-hand's big-ass purse.

I kind of have this moment of "whaaaa?" Then, without a word from the dirty-blonde stall-bitch, the camera pops over the top of the door and hovers there.

I reach up in slow mo, plucking the camera out of the massive hand, and turn to the two women still watching my disposable camera drama unfold. Their arched brows are now skewed into quizzical double-tiered shapes.

And we're all just kind of looking at each other, so I whsiper really fucking loudly for the benefit of the stall occupant, "Ssssshhhhhhheeeee haaaaaad iiiiiit iiiiiiin heeeeeerrrrrr puuuuurrsssee!"

Then we all leave (thief still in stall), and I can't help but laughing on my way to the escalators, cause really, who steals a disposable camera with the film half-used? Maybe I understand sinking some swag in your purse when the opportunity arises, but someone else's disposable camera? Not even that she was going to take it -- what's really funny is that she denied knowing anything about it. She was trying to KEEP my disposable camera even though I KNEW it was in there.

Maybe she's perversely fascinated by other people's pictures. Maybe she's just a sicko.

I figure if someone is going to go through the trouble of stealing my disposable cam (cause I was tool enough to set it down in the first place), I'll never have anything nice, because my nice things are prone to bad ends. I know this. This is why I can't have nice things.

Well anyway, I can't buy nice things even if I want to because the bank hates my fiscal guts.

Could I really end up financially happy as a journalist? From what my media-spun friends are telling me, that's a no.

So I've been thinking, maybe the Canadian Military needs some journalist-background PR people. How hard could boot camp possibly be?



Strong, proud, and able to afford a camera.
Image attributed to jmbone.

letz git outta herr

My parents rented Are We There Yet? tonight.

When Ice Cube popped up onscreen wearing scads of 'blingage' in his tripped-out Lincoln, my mother says, "What are those? What is that? I've never seen that before! [she's talking about the rims]."

She's an almost 65-year-old white-assed devout French Catholic, and now she wants a Navigator with spinners.

"Well. He's just like Mr. T."

habeas corpus

I had a dream last night that my body rebelled against me. All the things that I know about every curve and every line making up me softened and became not mine. My face changed, it was pitted and long. My hands seemed large, and when I'd urge them to move they'd simply flap like dying fish. I was dismissed with no recognition for who I'd been and I fought it all, exhausted.

When I woke up I knew that I'd just dreamt what it must feel like to age. A friend asked me once if I was worried about it, if I was worried about being 'old.' I just answered yes without thinking, and he only smiled. I think he was trying to tell me that I could embrace it and stay young forever. Youth as a state of mind.

But I'm scared -- I think I'm young, but the fact that I'm so jaded and guarded has made me much older. My chance to be blazingly fearless and beautiful because of innocence seems gone now. And if it is, I wonder if I squandered it. I used to give over all of myself no-holds-barred to something, someone, but now, you'd have to chip away at my cement wall to even ask.

What am I talking about?

I've started to define myself as somewhat unchanging, accepting certain immutable facts about my life now, from this perspective -- where I'm going, who I am and what I'm willing to offer.

My neice though, at fifteen, is trying to jump the gun and I'm afraid she's missing her chance to not know.

I just found out that she's packed her bags, walked out of my sister's and moved across town to a shady situation with a 25-year-old probable drug dealer.

She's into cutting herself (once across that tender skin on her wrist) and self-piercing. She's stuck a needle though the underside of her lip. I believe she hurts herself because she wants to feel physically what she knows inherently. I understand sometimes pain is the only thing that's real.

Her chat name is punctuated by black hearts and 'I love you Chad,' and her online profile spits that she's a 'pie?cing fana+ic.I migh+ seem like a B*+ch bu+ I'm no+...playful.fli?+y.Life Sucks some+imes I jus+ wanna die.' She also failed this year, and with her new job at Timies I really doubt she'll go back.

I wanted to burst into her new den, smack the hoodlums that stole her and grab her and shake her and say "THIS IS STAGGERINGLY STUPID. YOU'RE RUINING YOUR LIFE! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!? WHAT THE FUCK!"

This is her moment though, and maybe this is what she has to do in her moment. Who am I to tell her what to do? The wall she's started building around herself already seems thicker than mine. Is age really a state of mind? God I hope she doesn't get older than me.

dear halifax,

I had this whole elaborate letter to you planned, but fuck it. If you've got a couch free the 4-7 weekend of August, e-mail me. I need a place to stay.

07/24/06 EDIT: You know you've been writing too much when you aren't aware how ridiculous 'but fuck it' sounds when you read it out loud.

I also still need a

if you've got one.
Image attributed to stimpdawg.

among other things...

I think death smiled in my father's teacup this morning, because he got a little reflective about family he'd lost.

"It's OK," he said solemnly staring out to the backyard, "when I die you can put my body in a garbage can for all I care -- only the spirit matters. People pass on but their spirits watch over us."

I'm not sure I like the fact that my grandmother may have been watching while we played up periscope at the beach yesterday.

seriously, you piss me off

I've been walking around the city and you know what I've been hearing everywhere?

'Holy fuck, it's hotter than a goddamn fuck out here.'

Where the hell were you losers back when it was snowing in April?

Ummmm, lemmmee guess-- complaining like bitches that it was cold.

Like it or shut up.

guess you were still in there somewhere

Ever search for one thing on google and find something completely unexpected?

An unassuming link brought me face to pixeled face with someone I used to love, and I nearly fell off the bed. My insides were boiling.

Sometimes people say 'you're just like I remember you, you haven't changed at all!' and it's like they're fucking happy about it.

Try telling that to my guts. From what I can see, people don't change enough.

crave this

These years are supposedly some sort of screwy tumultuous phase in a person's life, where 18-odd to 28-or-so-year-olds spend a lot of time alone. We're contemplating the whys, hows and what-the-fucks of life. Basically we all think or know we should be doing something, but we don't have a clue what that something is... so we can be out-of-control and self destructive, or confusedly happy and forward-looking all at the same time.

It's bizarre and hard to explain.

I've been jokingly calling it my incubational period.

Look at this jerked-off blog -- doesn't that have something to do with the fact that I'm trying to work myself out? I (we) feel like it's a waiting game, waiting for something to happen, for life to happen.

I specialized partly in magazine at j-school, and had to put together a prototype 'first' issue of an invented mag. In reality, magazine startups are lucky if they last even a year. But we decided it was an opportunity to put together a mag we'd actually read. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, we called it Crave: The Magazine for Cool People.

Our mandate was something like, twenty to thirty-something unapologetic urban adults with alternative views. Open, honest, brutal, feisty and a little crass, we want Crave to echo our dead-pan humorous looks at life without taking life (or ourselves) too seriously.

I wrote and organized the cover story about this fucked up transitional period psychologists are calling 'emerging adulthood.' I call it inexplicable - a state of being - and my article is a sympathetic glance.

The pictures are mine as well, and I love them. I wish I could take more, so I could digitally imprint people permanently into my life.

I know some gorgeous cats and kittens.




Of course, I also shot our COVER.

Sparked interests could always check out some more of our screenshots.

tell me how to miss you

I spent tonight with an old friend on a bench next to the muddy river.

Did anyone else know that ducks swam in straight lines? Or that vodka tastes like glass after the first swig?

flights of angels

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Patrick Christopher is the professor largely responsible for the way I feel about Shakespeare, and subsequently, acting. It's difficult to truly assimilate the fact that he died today. He last directed me as Ophelia... I feel strangely that he won't be directing me again. His passing marks the end of, something, I don't know. Perhaps the strength and solstice that fills my core when I think I hear the whispers of actors faintly through the trees of Point Plesant Park.

Can I also just say that he seemed too young and this feels so sudden? I wish I could comprehend.

I'm very sorry that he's gone. I encourage anyone reading this who might have worked with him to get in touch with Elizabeth at Shakespeare by the Sea.

personal transit

Leaving my old port of call this week sucked.

I complained bitterly about that city when I was living there, and now I'd give a whole heck of a lot just to be there again. The only consolation is that I know - I am certain - that if I'd hadn't left when I did, I never would. And then I wouldn't have the sweet satisfaction of going back.

That, and I didn't want to get shot. Because it seems like I would have if I'd stuck around, I was in every wrong place at every wrong time. The whole bloody-street bullet-holes-in-car-windows thing seemed really unnecessarily brutal. Does anyone reading this know what the hell that was all about? It's like guns were following me around... I'd leave the bar and somewhere behind me, someone would get a taste of lead -- I sort of [morbidly] wish I'd stuck around to see it happen -- I missed it twice by just minutes.

Onto my news, which is, I found an apartment in Toronto -- bought and paid for. This despite my not being in Toronto (making it difficult to shop around for some digs). I sent a friend to look at a few spots for me. Here's his description of the place, now my place, except for your amusement it's the mad lib version:

"So I met with ______ yesterday. The apartment was pretty easy to find, and pretty close to ______ (in fact, it really still is ______). So I'll say this: the ______ rocks. It's a nice 3 level ______ with a small front ____ and an enclosed ______ (both well kept). ______ seems very nice (she offered me a ______ of ______ as soon as I stepped in, since it's 33 degrees here everyday and I biked over). The house is ______, very ______, not a huge amount of space but not ______ (definitely more space than you girls had on ______ Street). Nice living room on the main floor, and a roomy-bright ______. The basement has kind of a low ______ (not Hobbit-low, just not ______) but it does have ______ cable, a ______ and ______, and a separate communal ______ room. The room upstairs is ______, about 10x15. It comes with a ______, a small ______ unit, and a nice big ______-sized bed.

So yeah, I totally recommend you ______ the place. For ____/ mo, it's actually a really _______ deal. Hell, if they weren't looking for a _____ girl I'd take it. I made sure to tell her you were ______, and easy to get along with (I'm ______ sure she believed me too)."

As for Toronto, I had a lot of options -- I even thought it was going to be Australia for a while, because Toronto as a city just plain sucks. Don't argue with me. It blows. And there are people here I'm going to miss so much, they'll be like slow healing stab wounds in my guts. But the opportunities I need are there (shitty city or no), not here. I want to leave. I'm not back in Halifax, and I'm not in Toronto yet -- this place feels like a stifling limbo. The people far away who are close to my heart will always be, and maybe they can visit.

Are you gonna miss me?


Image attributed to thetourist.

the weight of fire

I admire the art. The Artist admires my photos. So I've been a priviledged subject, and what I couldn't see in myself in black and white whirls around me in true colour.

self defense

Nights are warm along the coastline.

The surreality of the past few lingers like the heavy wisp of smoke I noticed hovering beyond the lit cigarette she held with a sort of lascivious grace.

We were in her room.

Warm dim light shadowed the arch of her body as she leaned against a glass table. Black hair, red walls, orange cat and her eyes caught in the corners of mine. I thumbed through the book of poems on her bed. 'Drunk...Cause I did it on purpose,' are lines on the opened page. I silently wondered if I'd had too much gin. The colours bled behind her. She was all that was still in focus. I could see her through the new gray cloud that streamed past her lips and swallowed the erstwhile wisps that still hung in the air. She was all I wanted to see.

I felt something like a welcomed intruder, listening to the little 'pop' of her breath as she took drags from her cig, and waiting for the smoke's red glow to fade so I could make that breath quicken.

It's all maddeningly sexy. She's beautiful and it's cruel.

Touching her is like being cut by the softest knife.

The next morning I woke up next to her and reached over to cup the curve of her shoulder so I could hold her while she slept, then closed her door very slowly to prolong the delicious ache of having to leave.

I wished today, as huge crowds filed onto the golf course (all standing so still and silent that I imagined it was filled with 16,000 heartbeats), I could be capable of holding her kind of fire close to me. Of being so infuriatingly impassioned by just the thought of her, that it might consume me -- fighting and loving so much and so hard that we shatter.

But what good is that kind of fire?

The sky answered me as fat raindrops began to fall with loud plops, leaving little water welts on my skin.

That kind of thing usually ends badly and leaves a never-ending burn. Better to douse it. Better to worship her body and think of her fondly.

I slipped off my shoes and snuck out onto an empty green in the back nine, delightedly feeling the table-topped grassy sponge bed against my bare soles.

I thought it was all so lush and so perfect as I turned my face up to the rain, but nothing right then could be as poetic as her just breathing.

burn-outs: 4 tee-offs: nil

Fuck thwacking a little white ball with a big iron stick, I'm a pro golf-cart racer. I'm a rocket -- a flash on the green. I'm Tiger-fucking-Woods on this golf cart.

You only thought 'slow down,' cause I'm a chick and golf is still boy's club.

Well just try and catch me.

you've got something (sexy) on your lip

I'm headed back to the Coast to cover the women's pro golf tour that hits Glen Arbour this week, and I hope the weather holds.

I also hope my favourite five-time Gemini Award nominee sportscaster Rod Black is there.

He's like a Canadian Burt Reynolds.

I

cakes in tins

My eighty-somethings grandmother and great-aunt, and my sixty-somethings mother and two sisters crowd the kitchen of a small cottage near a table covered in desserts. Tea biscuits smothered in strawberries and cream, pineapple squares, cran-orange loaf, and a tin of war cake -- a soft raisin-filled joy of a thing made with molasses and cooked-up during WWII because sugar was rationed -- are as much a tacky-scrumptious feast for the eyes.

The two older ones speak rapid-fire French, but my mother and her sisters have lost it. They just smile knowingly and roll their eyes when the two start to argue over whether the old house great-grandfather built was up the road or down the road.

A French cousin from the Boston arm of the family is sitting in the parlour shaking her head. Somehow the conversation turned to religion, and she says she feels betrayed by the French Catholic Church for 'brainwashing her.'

"It was was always 'Sister said [read: nun],' and we didn't know any better," there is a faint waver in her voice. "But they lied, things weren't really that way."

I can only guess at what exactly she means.

On the other side of the room Ma Grande Tante is on a completely different track. She tells me she's never had a drink in her life -- not coffee, no liquor, never smoked. Never. Imagine this. She's eighty-two.

"Smoking! Neh! If you smoked back then you were bad, oh very bad. De boys smoked, but not girls." She pronounces bad as though it has an 'e' on the end. Her voice curls around the English words, adjusting the emphasis and accenting the meaning. I catch something like a twinkle in her eye. The image of a brazen lipsticked femme fatale straight out of film noir pivots on high heels in my head and then it's gone.

My grandmother, dwarfed by her armchair and swatting at the only mosquito in the room, catches the word 'bad' and the sound that escapes her seems to come directly from her nose.

"Hhnnna? Bad? De de de dese bugs are bad ehn ehn ehn (she laughs)."

This starts something new. Ma Grande Tante describes how, back in the day, her Grandpere and his sons would rub shortening and creoline together over their hands and faces to ward off blackflies.

I'm nodding silently when my father leans over, pointing to the two generations of women to come before me, and whispers, 'you take a good look, cause that's going to be you."

Funny he said that, cause I had just been surveying the room, listening to all of their voices, scrutinizing their similar bodies and thinking 'it's only a matter of time.'



My mother has heard and she's cracking up.

One of her beautiful hands flies up to cover her mouth and the other holds tight to her shiny rainbow mug. "Oh honey," she laughs, lightly gesturing with her tea, "you'll be the new improved version."

I just want to be clear about something

I love the human form.

Yes, it's new to the blog, but I didn't just think of this, I've known it since I spent oodles of time in jazz dance class surrounded by black tight-clad bodies. I'm convinced there's nothing more beautiful. Tattooed, thick, thin, flabby, muscular -- it's all so intoxicating. I could watch the sinew under your skin move for hours.

Thunder rolled across sunset back-lit orange cloudy sky tonight. The rain is still pouring down heavy outside. I thought about my own shape as I resigned myself to it, and stepped out of the screen door onto the platform patio and then to the lush lawn. I stretched my head back and my arms out like a baptized babe. Embracing the rain isn't that unusual, but it is rare. When's the last time you really stopped shielding yourself and gave in?

When's the last time you got wet?

my life, the musical!

I went to the bank and I felt like Oliver with a sooty face and a hand out asking for more gruel.

"Please sirs, can I have some more? (money)"

"Um, no."

So how are the Olivers of the world supposed to get by? I'm freshly graduated so there's no student lines of credit on the handout list, and well, I'd have to prove I make over 30 grand a year to get a personal one (I do, I swear I do! Stop asking for proof! I'm the freelance journalist equivalent of the artful-fucking-dodger bitches!). So the answer is no, and I stay broke.

The most tragic irony here is that if I were, say, working down at your friendly local call center, I could prove I'm making that much.

Why didn't I get that job versus the bar job I'm currently cursing?

The answer is, I tried. I nearly hyperventilated walking towards the doors, but I goddamn tried.

The whole incident spawned a story idea, an expose maybe... I applied online first with my well-rounded CV (looking a little pompous with two degrees and lots of experience in my field), then like a dutiful job searcher I showed up on their doorstep (squeezing my resume and holding my breath so as not to pass out).

"Um... (gasp) I don't know if I'm in the right place, but I just wanted to check back with you folks about a resume I submitted online. It's been about a week and I haven't heard anything, uh, I thought I would drop off one in person in case, you know, you don't get them right away? or maybe I submitted it wrong...(sucking the air back into my lungs)"

"Oh nO!" The woman or secretary or whatever at the counter has stringy blonde hair and too much blue eye shadow. Her mouth is opened in this permanent 'O' shape that, combined with the gaudy make-up, gives her the look of a cupie doll giving an invisible blow-job. Every time she speaks she's adding these little extra 'oooo' sylables to whatever she says, and I envision a big porcelain dick in her mouth.

"Of cOurse we wOuld have gOt it, we lOOk everyday, SOooOo, if you sent it, we've seen it OOoK?"

"Ok... when maybe can I expect to hear?"

"We call as SooOn as we see yOur resume."

"Right. Thanks."

I escape the x-rated cupie doll and head back for the door, push it open and breath in deeply leaning against the handrail. The sign on the backside of the door, facing inwards so employees can see it, advertises some employee incentive that suddenly confuses me. It says something to the effect of "Company Referral! If you get one of your friends to come work for us, you're guaranteed a big fat $300 bonus! Yay!" I'm picturing a ring master with a whip goading little lion-shaped phones through hoops.

Let me get this straight, you pay your employees to recruit their friends, you saw my resume as soon as I sent it and you call potentials the same day -- you want new workers, you just don't want me.

I got over this creepy unfairness fairly quickly, because really, I didn't want to work there anyway. But it stuck in my head.

I recently chatted with a friend about the weirdness that is the call center industry and she said I was blind to the obvious: call centers don't want your ambition.

"Change your resume," she said, "make it look like you never graduated, and you don't have any experience with anything... they'll hire you on the spot. They don't want to know you've got a drive for success, they want you to get stuck."

It's the first time I've ever heard of a company discriminating against jobseekers with too much education.

The fact that I might have too much moxie to fit in at the call center should come as a compliment, but I was a little pissed at the idea.

Why?

A little less education and a call center job, and those bitches at the bank might be brown nosing right up my ass to give me a little money to start something. As it stands I have two degrees, no money, and late afternoons in this city that sometimes feels like an oppressively backwater hole, you can find me cleaning ashtrays on a Mainstreet patio.

Well at least I'm not answering phones.


Image attributed to m:j:b.

this is what's next

As an adjunct to my last post. Online news is evolving again. Now the free online encylopedia Wikipedia is doing a comparable job covering the London bombings. Why didn't I take online journalism in school? I fucking love the internet.

Literally mere minutes after the bombings, the photos start pouring in on flickr. I also love flickr.









Pictures attributed to the members of flickr's London Explosions pool.

tube sick

Besides the fact that I'm worried about friends in London, I'm slightly thankful to CNN for being the coverage frontrunner. I also never thought I'd say that. Normally, I think of CNN as the jaded one-sided biased-towards-America closed-minded etc news network, but consistently CNN distinguishes itself with live coverage of the (horrible/important/life-changing/world impacting) events around the globe, and frankly, it's because they have the resources. The depth of the reports is still questionable, but you know they're going to go longer and further with their live eyes in London.

Ridicule them all you want, but CNN's schooling media north of the border -- regular Canadian news shows live networks and/or otherwise are scrambling to get coverage together you can listen to or hear in real time. They're taking cues from CNN on how to cover the big stuff.

During 9/11 CBC radio went back to regularly scheduled programming, because they didn't know what else to do.

On another note, I'm frustrated and sickened. People are dead in the Tube -- transit I relied on for months in London. A friend recently brought me back a Tube map, because he is well aware how much I happen to love that sprawling underground system. I always felt safe.



How terribly ironic is this?

unwitting journalist refuses to jump hoops in federal circus

Reprehensible and beastly.

Another blow to freedom of press in the United States. Vladimir Putin's George Bush's administration should really be ashamed, but they're probably gleeful over this one.

all systems stop

Sometimes your heart just breaks so suddenly that you're left with the inability to even cry out at the injustice. Wait, did I just type 'injustice?' How is it injustice that I feel heartbroken? That doesn't make any sense. Shouldn't the feeling be somewhat second nature to by now? I should feel at home.

I have always had far too many lovers who don't love me. I think beyond missing their beauty, their hands and their mouths, I would kill for the assurance that one of them really knew me. But that takes time and honesty, and I've always been too comfortable conjuring up relationships I can play out to their demise in my own head rather than invest in a substantial one -- an excuse to hover above and out the dating fray's reach. I picture myself floating up into the far-off and away from complication.

Then again, maybe my heart is broken because the only catalyst for change is my self and I'm not strong enough.

I can't even tell the drunk guy at the bar who stinks like cigars to leave me alone. I can't even tell my boss I want time off. I can't even tell my own parents that I feel trapped. I can't even tell someone how I feel.

I'm useless.

If anyone (else) can't tell, it's late, and I'm feeling tired, thinking about the things I cannot will into being. The familiar touch of someone else's skin against mine on these cool sheets won't simply manifest itself because I wish it would. I can't have these things just because I wish I could.

But I'm stuck at wishes, I don't know what comes next.

snapshot heart

Now that I find myself without camera, it seems everything is a picture. I keep reminding myself to bring Shakespeare (who manages more imagery and ideas in one line than contemporary writers do in one novel) to the beach, so I can recall that words can be just as eloquently and excitingly visual as a photo.

But it's raining right now, and I can hardly picture the sand and the waves of the weekend. The experience is such a hazy image in my mind that I'm not sure I ever saw it right at all.

What's the use of feeling it if you can't share it?

I'll let ee cummings be my thousand words this once.

maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach(to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone. For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea

I think molly met my crab.

summer acumen

A blogging aquaintance of mine, Laura the Tooth, is the reason I've got Preparation H in one of my top drawers. She was absolutely dead-on about it being a cure for long-weekend eyes like the ones I woke up with this morning. Yeah the shit stinks, but so do cucumber slices, and veggies don't work half as fast as ass cream. So while my puffy eyes are shrinking down to their normal size, I thought I'd type all the things I was too tired/too hung over/too on the go to sit down and type since Friday brought the weekend in.

I worked late Canada Day.

The rain came in hot flushes and went away again and raised the ground temperature to steaming. It washed away most of the crowds who came to watch (in my case, hear) the fireworks. After all was said and done, I walked up main in my change of clothes and slinky heels sweating.

I had a nightcap with a troupe of people I just happened to graduate with. One of them is someone I once fretted about on a movie date. He now, like most everyone else here, works in landscaping. They all look the exact same -- and what's worse, the after-party is still going strong; the exact same party I left at 4am years ago when I was a senior in highschool.

Saturday is decidedly better. I wake up late, befriend the new girl at work, let's call her 'Veronica' and say she's a tiny spunky French girl who laughs like I imagine a chipmunk would if a chipmunk could laugh. We met a couple from Saint John and decided to show them how we do afterhours. Many illegal activities follow suit including a trip to the bootleggers, open liquor in a public park and in several moving cars, and having a dirty breakfast at the Big Stop. OK, that last one wasn't illegal but it fucking well should be. We watched the sun come up from the Irving parking lot.


They are nice enough to send us pictures.

Sunday, first of two days off, I sleep away the Big Stop at the beach. It's the perfect beach hybrid day: hot with a cool breeze, warm water with cool waves. I'm smitten with this day.

I swim first thing, wading out shin deep, then thigh, and then I'm suddenly up to my waist and not having as much fun anymore. The waves go on forever and I'm thinking about what might be under them.

Why didn't the media report the specs of those shark attacks along the Florida Gulf?

OK, news-wise you start with the most important thing and head on down to the not-so-sensational details. It's called the inverted pyramid. Goes like this:
new shark attackboy loses his leg while fishing in Floridahere's what authorities are saying about the incidentconsequently, here's how people feel and maybe five years' worth of shark attack stats

But the media left out the details I'm really worried about as I'm wading past the waist-deep line. The boys fishing when the shark hit them-- were they casually dropping bait or gutting fish over the water? Can't sharks smell blood? Would I have to be chumming up the water to get a shark's attention? So they were waist deep. How come they didn't see the shark coming? More importantly, what kind of shark was it, could that same shark, say, swim this far north and would I see him coming?

I kind of answer my last silent question on my own. The sun is glinting off the water and into my eyes, and the waves and the spray are distorting the shadows flying across the ocean floor ahead of the undulating image of my white underwater feet at the sandy bottom.

So I admit I'm afraid of sharks and the longer I think about it, the more scared I am of diving in. Wait, there's never been a fucking shark attack at this beach in the history of, well, this beach. I know this. Am I more afraid of sharks or getting my hair wet? Maybe if I had someone with me. I wanted a boy. Someone to dunk me, or grasp my lightly around the waist with hands sliding across my skin underwater. I wanted to play.

I look back at the crowded crescent beach from halfway across the first sandbar. I'm just waist deep, but I'm the one who's furthest out -- I'm by myself and contemplating coming back in.

Look at little miss Riley, she needs a man so she can go swimming. When I was a kid it wouldn't have mattered -- I was a mermaid. Now I'm griping about sharks and my hair. Pathetic much?

Fuck it.

I scold myself and get under. I'm a mermaid again. I spend most of the day in as far out as I dare myself to go.

The beach is like a living organism. It can change nearly beyond recognition. The next day the waves are calm and the little creatures have come out. I see two big crabs - one dead and one alive. The living one does a sideways scuttle away from me. You have to grab them from their little crab behinds if you want to pick them up. Or for the more courageous (or foolhardy, whatever), you can go for their two pinchers. They're nasty-beautiful.

This morning I wake up and CBC radio is saying the Atlantic Nationals Car Show starts up tomorrow. Burn-outs, mullets, vintage cars and boys with Harleys asking me to go for a ride -- another long weekend.

I'll spend my days in the salt water making my skin smooth and my hair blonde, and my nights wiping away the sweat. Summer's here I guess -- every shitty city is the better for it--I've decided to make a glorious mess of myself.

The CBC also mentions that a man died in a car accident late last night when he 'failed to negotiate a turn.' I know the word use is right, so why does it sound so damn wrong? Probably because the poor soul is dead and turns don't negociate.

I'm a ticking time bomb.

tick tick tick

If you set me off you won't regret it.

rainy day relics

Something very cool about rooting through your old stuff is finding Bob Dylan 'Bootlegs, Hard Rain and Saved,' the double Woodstock album and Yaz on 12" vinyl.

midnight oil

It's after midnight and I'm driving home from work eager to spend a little well-earned cash at the local shoppers drug -- some body lotion, more SPF, a new toothbrush or something is completely in order.

Well what do you know, 'tough luck asshole, stuff around here isn't open past ten o'clock, what the hell were you thinking?'

I'm not used to this shit. I like the good ol' reliable 24-hour shoppers back on the coast. Whatever I need; however drunk I am; whenever it happens to be; I can get my shit bought.

Okay -- I suppose there are upsides to this place. My face may have sunk as my car peeled past the obviously closed store, but my spirits stayed high because French radio kicks ass after dark. 98.3 FM is playing some bizarre-awesome mix that sounds like Tricky took Massive Attack to Paris and had an orgy in a five star hotel near a rave bar at La Bastille.

I roll my window down to feel the hot air brushing my hair with thick scented fingers. The volume controls are on the wheel so I can turn it up with the flick of an index finger.

I roll past a group of teens standing in the haloed halogen bulb light of a Quik Mart where I used to buy penny-candy (can you still get candies for a penny?). They're so defiant. They're about to stroll into the woods and disappear for a few hours of reckless abandon, whispering near backyard fences and crawling through the underbrush of big fir trees.

In one night they can register ecstatic despair and horrible joy. They are mind-blowing. They remind me of Suburbia. They remind me of me.

They all turn and look, and I realize I'm riding with the windows rolled down and the music cranked like I should have a spoiler, some decals and some neon lights hooked to my undercarriage. The strangest thing though... I'm not in the slightest bit deterred or embarrassed at my completely tactless display, in fact, I flip the station louder and tilt back onto the headrest.

Exhale.

I can almost hear them saying, "hrmphhh, what a loser," "oh my gawd, listen to that crap," "what the hell - what a nutjob..."

The truth is, I know what they're saying isn't really what they feel, because if they were in this seat, they would feel this too. This would be all they could want in this moment - and all they could ever need - and the bass would sink deep into them as the warm breeze blew the balmy smell of night leaves across their faces.

Loud music, a humming engine and the midnight air.

Personify possibility. Manifest life.