Sunday, April 01, 2007
muchtoolong update
I completely forgot to write in here last week. I was having such a hard time holding it all together that blogging kind of fell by the wasteside.
Week 1 of illness was very sad. I detest lying at home, wasting time, feeling horrible and knowing that every day I spend out of work is another day of lost income and lost favour at a new job.
My anxiety got so bad that my mother actually came over to give me sedatives. I eventually got over the fact that they dissolve unpleasantly under your tongue, tasting like old-fashioned blackboard chalk, and the fact that I got the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" in my head every time I took one ("Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go. I wanna be sedated."). But they made me feel horribly groggy and stoned on the bus the next morning, so I stopped taking them. So much for my glamorous lifestyle as a presription-pill-popping debutante. I don't have the blue blood for that lifestyle anyway.
Week 2 of illness felt somewhat more proactive, as I was back at work and actually making money, but my voice would give out in my first class and I would spend the rest of the day speaking like swimming in sand. Most painful, and unpleasant. Thursday, my ten-hour teaching day, was particularly unfun. At least my students were sweet and my employer was understanding.
Friday was strange, since in my third class one of my students asked the inevitable "do you have a boyfriend?" I said no, and this was followed by "but why? You are so beautiful!" Apparently one can dodge a lot of questioning by shrugging and smiling. Friday was a day rife with gay jokes at work. What a quagmire. There must be a way to object without sounding overly PC or well, gay.
I'm still pretty weak heading into Week 3, and even my kitten has more energy than I do. I can sleep for 12 hours and feel like I've scarcely shut my eyes. But enough complaining.
I did take a photo of cherry blossoms for the girl I kinda sorta like, though I had to wait an entire week for the sun to come out enough to facilitate photography. I enlarged it, framed it, wrapped it, wrote her a card, wrapped some fresh cherry blossoms in ribbon on top, and then had to wait until 9:00 the night of her birthday for her to come by and pick it up. She sent me a mysterious email two days later that read: "I know that you must have put a lot of thought and effort into the picture, frame, finding the card, writing the card, and the branch. None of it has been unnoticed."
Whatever that means. Then she invited me to a concert, which I had to decline cause I had plans to go down to the Drive with Em for what she called "chick watching." The girl is hard to read. I'm definitely not hopeful.
Taking one's time has it downsides, though. I met a neat girl at a party in Whistler a few months ago, but waffled about her, thinking she probably wasn't my type. I saw her another couple of times, always at a club, and started to think she was actually really neat. She's an honest-to-god airplane pilot, and spends her days jetting between various cities. She's a neat girl, but I spent too long undecided and now she's seeing someone else. Dang. And here I was thinking the early worm gets eaten by the bird.
My satisfaction with being single is still there for the most part, though now I've started having these strange moments of longing.
I decided the other day that I wanted to make blueberry pancakes for breakfast on the weekend. So I did, and they turned out well. But how sad is eating blueberry pancakes alone? Tres sad. And pancakes are too distinctly breakfast to be made for anyone who hasn't already stayed the night.
So...Jag, when you're in town you're eating my pancakes! I still remember with fondness the ones you made for me in Holland. Lovely.
And then there are these horrid dreams I keep having. The other night I had dreams I was hitting on the most odious and horrible older men, something I like to think I would never do in real life. But in the dream it was inescapably, uncontrollably necessary. Ugh. What the hell is wrong with me?
I sometimes even allow myself to feel sad about the people who have crumpled me up and thrown me away. Hayley is hard to forget because everything in this damn city seems to be named after her. Even the park by my house bears her name. And Claire, well, now I miss something that no longer exists and probably never did. Her dog is fine, by the way. I decided to do the nice thing and send her a text message asking how the little creature was doing. She wrote back two words: "She's good." That was all. No questions about how I was, no elaboration, nothing. It sometimes saddens me that the people I was closest to now don't value me at all.
The other day Maya got bright orange pollen from a tiger lily on top of my fridge all over her forehead. It still hasn't come off, despite scrubbing with a washcloth, which she did not enjoy. Silly yellow-headed feline.
Now she's going to lie in a sunbeam. Cute.
Oh, yes, and at the moment I'm obsessed with the following music:
Louis XIV - Lovely, crazy, indie rock about girls taking their clothes off. Rife with innuendo. My kind of tunes.
Brazilian Girls - Their new album is called Talk to La Bomb, and it's to die for. I particularly like Jique - several languages in one song, but somehow its feeling of hopeless crushing comes across loud and clear.
The Knife - Silent Shout is the weirdest Scandinavian electropop, and I love it.
The Blow - Oh their new album is such a joy. It's more of the same "we just got together and made sounds in our garage because we felt like it" sound, but it's more polished and prettier. Parentheses is the closest this strange "band" gets to a sweet little love song. You can watch the weird video here.
Feist - Her new album is called The Reminder, and of course I hunted down and downloaded an advance copy so I can listen to it before her concert in May. I also hunted down her first solo album which no one (myself included) seems to have heard of. It's called Monarch and it's lovely, though obviously not as catchy as Let It Die. Thank God for Wikipedia.
Buck 65 - He released a puzzling little mixtape online called Strongarm. It's very Buckesque in its insistence on having two twenty-something minute sides like a real tape. It's wacky and weird and sublime and sweet -- very, very Buck.
Interpol - Their newest album is called Antics, and I quite love it.
Mirah - C'mon Miracle is her newest, and it's her usual mellow indie girl rock. Jerusalem is a brilliant and surprising little track that's critical of Israel and brilliant in its copious Biblical references - guess she's not a Zionist after all.
I'm also getting back into Rilo Kiley in a big way. They're such lovely, sad romantics.
Most of this music I've been listening to because some of the bands will be at Sasquatch in Washington State in May. Me and the girl I kinda-sorta-like have tickets. We're camping in her truck. Stay tuned.
Oh, and I'm reading Ivan Coyote's Loose End. I love her stories, especially the ones about East Van. They're strangely related to things I've experienced and places I've been. Her little odes to queerdom are reassuringly close to home.
This is much too long.
But there ya go. A post!
Laters,
N
