If you had to be a sexual object, what object would that be?

I'd be a finely tuned instrument.

I pretend I'm doing other work-related things around the office, but really I'm sneaking off to the washroom to be alone with the copy of Steinbeck's East of Eden I've been eating for breakfast.

Three chapters per 10 flushes.

The women around here don't like each other to hear the sound of their pee, so they sit silently holding it, bending over occasionally to see whether my feet are still there, agitated.

And I thought Steinbeck was tragic.

baby, say 'I miss you' too

Dear creativity (you too, unabashed virtuosity and noisy self-abandon),

I'm sure it seems like I'm taking my time to get back to you.

Slide 4 of twenty of 'defining mission, vision and strategy statements' for insert-any -global-corp.-name-of-choice-here's massive business development presentation, 8 bullet points down: 'the vision statement should give you goosebumps when you hear it'.

Officially, or at least on paper, I should now be getting goosebumps over a glorified corporate ambition - this 'vision statement' - I should be positively tingling when I hear them say something totally capitalist and overblown like, 'we envision ourselves as the most preferred, the most industrious and the most profit-ous (us) in the market'.

I'm listening. No goosebumps.

My goosebumps aren't defective. I do get 'em - oh say, when dancers move, when the first few notes of piano twinkle-in over the clapping near the end of Nina Simone's song 'Sinnerman', when I'm standing on an empty stage, when someone says 'I understand you', when something's beautiful, or when I read what good writers write out loud (to name a few off the top of my head).

Wouldn't it simply be paradisiacal to get paid for those goosebumps?

As it stands, they're really not worth much around here.

a saturday in pictures

single rile

Out here in corporate-capitol Canada, suits and skirts actually fucking line-up to take the bus. Are we seriously either that polite, or that territorial or both now that we have to line-up? Everyone's getting on the damn bus, so what is going on? Goddamn effing losers. Every last one of them. Me included.

I was so sick of being another dumbass loser lined-up to take the bus I completely cracked this morning transferring from the 206 to the 19 north.

Oh yes. Blame it on the moon, blame it on the chicken, blame it on the mercury retrograde, but it's been a long time coming.

Get on. Ride past the tall xeroxed office towers, a repetitive pissing contest of steel and colored glass and who's-got-the-biggest logos stretching down the highway. Get off. Stand. In. Line.

"Not to-fucking-day!" I screamed (who says I have to get in line? Where the hell is the sign that states everyone waiting for the 8:05 must be back-to-front in the order they arrived at the stop?).

I planted myself a few feet away from the front of the line and hovered angst-ily, snarling, itching to pounce like a jackal.

The bus peeled in and crash landed at the front near the squat little bitch in a bundle of coat I had pegged as my only competition.

That's when I made my move.

I let out a pent-up wail, hurling myself against her and nailing her into the concrete.

"'scuse me!" she squealed like a stuck pig under my feet.

"Get outta my way stupid ho!" I hollered as I flew onto the bus and landed a fat punch square on the driver's jaw and smacked him off his seat.

The line-up was piling-up after me so I reached over the knocked-out driver and whiz-banged the doors shut, fired up the beasty engine and steered the 19 north south.

We're headed to Brazil, where the bus is getting a paint-job and I'm getting collagen injections.

Vazar ônibus! Hola Brasília!

Bus to HELL! ~ an actual Mississauga bus fire caught in digital by palmerized

you vex me

I like being called 'girl'.

'My girl', 'hey girl', 'come 'ere girl' and also 'this is the girl right here'.

I am a bit of a girly girl, so it suits, and I'd never bulk at 'girl' just because it's generally dismissed as demeaning. I think 'feminine feminist' is redundant.

Consequently, I don't like 'baby', but paradoxically, I love 'babylove'.

I love it for no reason other than the first time I heard it, I fell for the voice that said it.

Call me 'girl' if you want to. If I ever call you 'babylove', it's not my being reminiscent - it's because I want you to feel what I remember having felt that first time.