There's nothing like a Friday afternoon with nothing but time and unlimited internet access on your hands.
I considered doing some work on that thing that might one day turn into a book or something like it, but opted to instead do something that takes far less focus and creative energy, as I'm sorely, dearly lacking both at the moment. Perhaps once Sunday's big move is over I'll be able to finish one of the numerous half-done projects I currently have going, but until then here's a smattering of songs (in no particular order) which have soundtracked a February that I can't even begin to try to explain. Enjoy.
SeeqPod - Playable Search
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Aftermath
Friday.
Decide to find a new job, become intent upon finding new job. Crash a Von Bondies show across the street from my place, make flirty small talk with a handsome 20 year old boy, kidnap such boy and take him to wherever those L.A. girls are tonight, take him to crowded bathroom stalls, take him to McDonald's, take my time. Sleep, eventually. He can sleep in the kitchen.
Saturday.
Wake up with a 20 year old boy in my house. Wake. Up. Sit in Starbucks alone, run into a friend and open his store with him; listening to the Rolling Stones and eating muffins there, it feels like life is good. Leave the store under the glare of McCaul, and go for a walk. Run into leeching friends, run into the ex and his new, semi-handsome roommate. Go to the bookstore. Get hit on by creepy lecherous dudes hanging out in the Self Help aisle. Run away. Oh yeah, it's Valentine's Day, isn't it? Walk around underground for hours, and think about how fucked up things were on the eve of this day exactly one year ago. Decide a pasta binge is in order. Make pasta, binge, help R move boxes up and down staircases, up and down, up and down. Binge again. Text war with a boy. Binge a little more. Pass out. Blank.
Sunday.
Wake up late, get coffee and snack, wait for R, drink with R, eat pizza, D and C come over, A comes over. Cab ride. Guvernment special treatment, shit DJs, whistling girls who think we're the girlfriends of the shit DJs, dancing, smoking in the back behind a screen of laser light. Peeing with the help of a key shaped like a baby's arm and a dude who's a stranger peeing in the sink while someone supervises so no one looks at one another. Scummy. Hot dogs outside with R after a lot of stolen-from-the-shit-DJ-beers and gold lame leggings dancing through lasers. Cab ride. So-called after hours at some guy's place. Other people sitting on the floor, all boring. Fat girls in McDonald's while the sun's quickly coming up, who work for the company I desperately applied to on Friday. Karma! Fate! My life as a waster has all come together for a reason!
Or not.
Just more BLT bagels outside in the cold, bagels with cheese in toaster ovens like my mom used to make for me, sleeping in a bed with R on the other side while the sun is glaring, warm and hope-filled, through my tiny window. Peace.
Monday.
Wake. R. More bagels. R in aviators and a polo cardigan, me in fat-day leggings and a baggy sweater and shades that aren't mine, hiding my disdain for that sun which I loved that morning. Loved it with all my being. Bagels and sunshine, great ways to end a great night. Stumble over to my mother's house, occupied only with my brother and his drugs and my television. Do something good for my future, that I said I would do over a month ago. Watch five police cars stop everyone and everything that moves under another window. Wonder, is the danger greater now or when they leave? Good question, or paranoia? Decide firmly upon the latter and OH FUCK what about my brother, he left right before they arrived! Could this all be about him? Oh no, oh no, oh no. Motivation to let the paranoia take over and call HE'S FINE. So I'll wait longer. Get home. Get stoned. Fall asleep at a good time for the first time in a while. And don't forget to set the alarm, the shower can wait til tomorrow.
Tuesday.
New French Girl living here in my house. What the fuck, why is someone else up at the same time as me? Motivation to make coffee, make small talk, drag my ass out of there. Work sucks. Apply to more jobs that will ignore me. Pretend to care about other people's shit and can't manage to be really quite nice to any of them.
Another fucking day in the easy life.
And it's so fucking hard.
But walk home eventually, purposefully, dress hems and meetings with mom in mind. There are voices in my kitchen that don't sound like the usual ones, but I'm sure someone just has friends over, nothing new. Except they're old faces. Chinese lady landlord, father of the bitch upstairs and an old, faded man I've never seen before. Miserable, sad McCaul has kicked us out. She's crazy. She'sabsolutelyandcompletelyinsaneandTRICKSpeopleintothinkingshe'snotbutsheis and Oh My God I Have to Move Again.
I Have No Money.
Oh
God.
The past three months of my life flash before my eyes and I continue to calmly marker my dresses, get a move on. Hang out with my mother, trade insults with my brother, take the streetcar 'home', drop out from thinking about what I'm going to do. My dead grandpa's sweater and favourite plaid are comforts, but not comforts enough. And I don't know where the fuck I'm going to go now. Sleep.
Decide to find a new job, become intent upon finding new job. Crash a Von Bondies show across the street from my place, make flirty small talk with a handsome 20 year old boy, kidnap such boy and take him to wherever those L.A. girls are tonight, take him to crowded bathroom stalls, take him to McDonald's, take my time. Sleep, eventually. He can sleep in the kitchen.
Saturday.
Wake up with a 20 year old boy in my house. Wake. Up. Sit in Starbucks alone, run into a friend and open his store with him; listening to the Rolling Stones and eating muffins there, it feels like life is good. Leave the store under the glare of McCaul, and go for a walk. Run into leeching friends, run into the ex and his new, semi-handsome roommate. Go to the bookstore. Get hit on by creepy lecherous dudes hanging out in the Self Help aisle. Run away. Oh yeah, it's Valentine's Day, isn't it? Walk around underground for hours, and think about how fucked up things were on the eve of this day exactly one year ago. Decide a pasta binge is in order. Make pasta, binge, help R move boxes up and down staircases, up and down, up and down. Binge again. Text war with a boy. Binge a little more. Pass out. Blank.
Sunday.
Wake up late, get coffee and snack, wait for R, drink with R, eat pizza, D and C come over, A comes over. Cab ride. Guvernment special treatment, shit DJs, whistling girls who think we're the girlfriends of the shit DJs, dancing, smoking in the back behind a screen of laser light. Peeing with the help of a key shaped like a baby's arm and a dude who's a stranger peeing in the sink while someone supervises so no one looks at one another. Scummy. Hot dogs outside with R after a lot of stolen-from-the-shit-DJ-beers and gold lame leggings dancing through lasers. Cab ride. So-called after hours at some guy's place. Other people sitting on the floor, all boring. Fat girls in McDonald's while the sun's quickly coming up, who work for the company I desperately applied to on Friday. Karma! Fate! My life as a waster has all come together for a reason!
Or not.
Just more BLT bagels outside in the cold, bagels with cheese in toaster ovens like my mom used to make for me, sleeping in a bed with R on the other side while the sun is glaring, warm and hope-filled, through my tiny window. Peace.
Monday.
Wake. R. More bagels. R in aviators and a polo cardigan, me in fat-day leggings and a baggy sweater and shades that aren't mine, hiding my disdain for that sun which I loved that morning. Loved it with all my being. Bagels and sunshine, great ways to end a great night. Stumble over to my mother's house, occupied only with my brother and his drugs and my television. Do something good for my future, that I said I would do over a month ago. Watch five police cars stop everyone and everything that moves under another window. Wonder, is the danger greater now or when they leave? Good question, or paranoia? Decide firmly upon the latter and OH FUCK what about my brother, he left right before they arrived! Could this all be about him? Oh no, oh no, oh no. Motivation to let the paranoia take over and call HE'S FINE. So I'll wait longer. Get home. Get stoned. Fall asleep at a good time for the first time in a while. And don't forget to set the alarm, the shower can wait til tomorrow.
Tuesday.
New French Girl living here in my house. What the fuck, why is someone else up at the same time as me? Motivation to make coffee, make small talk, drag my ass out of there. Work sucks. Apply to more jobs that will ignore me. Pretend to care about other people's shit and can't manage to be really quite nice to any of them.
Another fucking day in the easy life.
And it's so fucking hard.
But walk home eventually, purposefully, dress hems and meetings with mom in mind. There are voices in my kitchen that don't sound like the usual ones, but I'm sure someone just has friends over, nothing new. Except they're old faces. Chinese lady landlord, father of the bitch upstairs and an old, faded man I've never seen before. Miserable, sad McCaul has kicked us out. She's crazy. She'sabsolutelyandcompletelyinsaneandTRICKSpeopleintothinkingshe'snotbutsheis and Oh My God I Have to Move Again.
I Have No Money.
Oh
God.
The past three months of my life flash before my eyes and I continue to calmly marker my dresses, get a move on. Hang out with my mother, trade insults with my brother, take the streetcar 'home', drop out from thinking about what I'm going to do. My dead grandpa's sweater and favourite plaid are comforts, but not comforts enough. And I don't know where the fuck I'm going to go now. Sleep.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Missed Connections.
As previously mentioned, I'm completely obsessed with craigslist's missed connections.
And no, I know what you're thinking - I'm not on there looking for myself....for one, I've already found myself once or twice, thankyouverymuch.
Secondly, and more significantly, the people who actually go through with posting missed connections are, by and large, not the kind of people I would consider going on a real, live date with. This rule is, of course, circumstantial and dependent upon who such secret admirer is and whatnot, but I would go so far as to say it's true more often than not.
Especially when I see posts like this.
Okay, so let me get this straight...dude saw this girl who may have been between 5'2" and 5'6" who may have had eyes that were one of four colours 'roughly' four to five whole fucking years ago, didn't speak a word to her, has thought of her every day since, quite possibly experienced a hallucination of seeing her again, and is now turning to CRAIGSLIST MISSED CONNECTIONS to find her??!
If this isn't one of the most disconcerting things you've ever read...well, then I really don't know what on earth you've been reading, and nor do I want to for that matter.
Other cities are great to read as well. One observation I've made is that Paris tends to have the fewest missed connections posts while New York consistently appears to have the most (and, might I add, the craziest of the bunch).
I like to think of craigslist missed connections forums as social experiments of sorts; I feel like clicking through the postings in any given city provides me with some tiny bit of insight as to what the populus of that place is like....which, in essence, leads me to the conclusion that there are stalkers, innocent romantics, criminals, lovers and assholes all across the globe, and that they are more craigslist-savvy in some cities than in others.
But yeah, you know what I mean.
And moreover, who am I kidding? I so checked this morning to see if that guy reading 'On Being & Nothingness' and making adorable eye contact with me at Osgoode station yesterday posted anything.
And no, I know what you're thinking - I'm not on there looking for myself....for one, I've already found myself once or twice, thankyouverymuch.
Secondly, and more significantly, the people who actually go through with posting missed connections are, by and large, not the kind of people I would consider going on a real, live date with. This rule is, of course, circumstantial and dependent upon who such secret admirer is and whatnot, but I would go so far as to say it's true more often than not.
Especially when I see posts like this.
i saw you roughly 4-5 years ago on the 512 Keele westbound streetcar from st clair station (east) during the school year. you we're about 5'2" - 5'6", brunette or dark brown hair, with caramel skin and light coloured eyes (blue/grey/green/hazel). you we're wearing a sort of sailor's coat and jeans. you we're sitting near the back and i was standing infront of the rear doors. I never went up to say anything because i was very shy then and it was pretty crowded. i thought i saw you again near mt. pleasent and eglinton but when i went for the double take you were gone so i think i might have just been dreaming that one. i know it's a long shot but there hasn't been a day that's passed by that you haven't crossed my mind... and i really want to know why, i wish i had said something even if it was stupid so you would have atleast noticed me...i hope you did...
Okay, so let me get this straight...dude saw this girl who may have been between 5'2" and 5'6" who may have had eyes that were one of four colours 'roughly' four to five whole fucking years ago, didn't speak a word to her, has thought of her every day since, quite possibly experienced a hallucination of seeing her again, and is now turning to CRAIGSLIST MISSED CONNECTIONS to find her??!
If this isn't one of the most disconcerting things you've ever read...well, then I really don't know what on earth you've been reading, and nor do I want to for that matter.
Other cities are great to read as well. One observation I've made is that Paris tends to have the fewest missed connections posts while New York consistently appears to have the most (and, might I add, the craziest of the bunch).
I like to think of craigslist missed connections forums as social experiments of sorts; I feel like clicking through the postings in any given city provides me with some tiny bit of insight as to what the populus of that place is like....which, in essence, leads me to the conclusion that there are stalkers, innocent romantics, criminals, lovers and assholes all across the globe, and that they are more craigslist-savvy in some cities than in others.
But yeah, you know what I mean.
And moreover, who am I kidding? I so checked this morning to see if that guy reading 'On Being & Nothingness' and making adorable eye contact with me at Osgoode station yesterday posted anything.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Very Strange People With Whom I Share A Very Strange Apartment: McCaul
Of the three individuals with whom I co-inhabit, the first is McCaul.
McCaul was the first person I knew in Very Strange Apartment prior to my move-in, and my extremely odd love-hate relationship with her can most easily be understood if you listen to the song 'Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth' by the Dandy Warhols...as I have, indeed, always known that she is insane. From the moment we met one another it's been glaringly evident that I am the reasonable Courtney Taylor-Taylor to her intelligent-but-fucking-crazy Anton Newcombe, and this dynamic has only increased in its scope since I began living in The Very Strange Apartment.
That being said, she's also kind of nice to be around in other ways. For one, McCaul at least knows the difference between there, their and they're, which is more than can be said of the other two, who I'll get on to at a later time. And she's a Cancer-Gemini cusp-er like me (though, as previously stated, her batshit Cancerian side is far more dominant than my own), resulting in us kind of getting each other in some fundamental way that defies the general logical standard of friendship.
To provide some insight into what it is like to live with McCaul: yesterday I found myself in said Strange Apartment with only her, which is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself, as she's usually off somewhere doing whatever it is she does all day that none of us can quite figure out. McCaul, who has recently quite literally kicked out one of our roommates for being a messy individual, made a bunch of noise in the bathroom for about half an hour, all the while audibly scoffing and huffing and puffing and making a general ruckus that led me to believe she was maybe possibly cleaning for the first time ever.
How wrong was I.
Upon her emergence from said washroom I was sitting at the kitchen table having a cigarette, as I tend to, and very politely asked her what she had been doing in the washroom for the past half hour. This was a simple enough question for someone to ask their friend/housemate, no?
God no! Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with McCaul, as my friendly "what were you up to in there?" was met with a four minute rant that went something along the lines of "ohmygod can I not do anything in this house without everyone fucking bothering me?!No one in the world gets me and my untapped genius, etc. etc...I am SO misunderstood by the fucking universe, etc. etc...and please just let me go to my room without bothering me...FUCK!"
...Okay, then.
Keep in mind that there were, as far as I know, absolutely no incidents leading up to this outburst of McCaul's; this is simply the kind of thing one comes to expect from her a few times a week on average. I nonetheless always find myself somewhat dumbfounded when met with her specific brand of crazy, and as such responded with a less-snarky-than-it-sounds-on-paper "I just wanted to know if you cleaned up in there", and proceeded to my own room to finish my cigarette, but not before surreptitiously checking out the state of the washroom (messier than before...how?!)
It's also interesting to note that no more than two hours later she invited me up to her room to have a glass of wine and listen to her talk about her on-again-off-again boyfriend. Which I did. The bathroom incident was never discussed. So I cleaned it myself.
McCaul was the first person I knew in Very Strange Apartment prior to my move-in, and my extremely odd love-hate relationship with her can most easily be understood if you listen to the song 'Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth' by the Dandy Warhols...as I have, indeed, always known that she is insane. From the moment we met one another it's been glaringly evident that I am the reasonable Courtney Taylor-Taylor to her intelligent-but-fucking-crazy Anton Newcombe, and this dynamic has only increased in its scope since I began living in The Very Strange Apartment.
That being said, she's also kind of nice to be around in other ways. For one, McCaul at least knows the difference between there, their and they're, which is more than can be said of the other two, who I'll get on to at a later time. And she's a Cancer-Gemini cusp-er like me (though, as previously stated, her batshit Cancerian side is far more dominant than my own), resulting in us kind of getting each other in some fundamental way that defies the general logical standard of friendship.
To provide some insight into what it is like to live with McCaul: yesterday I found myself in said Strange Apartment with only her, which is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself, as she's usually off somewhere doing whatever it is she does all day that none of us can quite figure out. McCaul, who has recently quite literally kicked out one of our roommates for being a messy individual, made a bunch of noise in the bathroom for about half an hour, all the while audibly scoffing and huffing and puffing and making a general ruckus that led me to believe she was maybe possibly cleaning for the first time ever.
How wrong was I.
Upon her emergence from said washroom I was sitting at the kitchen table having a cigarette, as I tend to, and very politely asked her what she had been doing in the washroom for the past half hour. This was a simple enough question for someone to ask their friend/housemate, no?
God no! Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with McCaul, as my friendly "what were you up to in there?" was met with a four minute rant that went something along the lines of "ohmygod can I not do anything in this house without everyone fucking bothering me?!No one in the world gets me and my untapped genius, etc. etc...I am SO misunderstood by the fucking universe, etc. etc...and please just let me go to my room without bothering me...FUCK!"
...Okay, then.
Keep in mind that there were, as far as I know, absolutely no incidents leading up to this outburst of McCaul's; this is simply the kind of thing one comes to expect from her a few times a week on average. I nonetheless always find myself somewhat dumbfounded when met with her specific brand of crazy, and as such responded with a less-snarky-than-it-sounds-on-paper "I just wanted to know if you cleaned up in there", and proceeded to my own room to finish my cigarette, but not before surreptitiously checking out the state of the washroom (messier than before...how?!)
It's also interesting to note that no more than two hours later she invited me up to her room to have a glass of wine and listen to her talk about her on-again-off-again boyfriend. Which I did. The bathroom incident was never discussed. So I cleaned it myself.
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