megan's blog

First, last night I was listening to the CBC. Not listening so much as using it for a comforting aural blanket while I ate my channa dal and read. There were murmurings in the background about the bird flu moving slower through Turkey (the country) than experts expected. Murmuring changes to Expert Voice, and starts in on this long list of why that might be. Smack dab in the middle of this list is "a new form of human-chicken interaction".

Now, this raises some questions for me.
1) When did slaughter get classified as an "interaction"?
2) How many *old* forms of human-chicken interaction are there?
3) Were the old ones not good enough? Did people become bored with the ol' same ol' same ol' on the human-chicken interaction front?

And then, because I can, I did a google search for "human-chicken interaction" and came across this article. If you are ever in a bad mood, just whisper the phrase "This is the first human-poultry interaction system ever developed" and I promise you'll feel better.

Other stories of note:
Brain Protein May Be Linked to Depression
Brains are fascinating. A tiny little protein and it makes you feel so bad. It's weird to think about finding a cure for it though. I went through a 2-year major depressive episode in my early 20s, and while I barely escaped, certainly didn't come out unscathed, and was more than happy to kiss the ass-end of my 20s goodbye, I'm not sure I'd trade the experience, either. Though at the time, brain surgery sure would have seemed like a good option.

Swingers clubs don't harm society, top court rules
"The judges, in a 7-2 ruling, said the test for indecency is the harm it causes, and not simply community standards." And amen to that. Defining harm is still pretty tricky, but a bit further up the slippery slope from defining community standards.

The organization I work for, those good people who allow me to pay my rent and buy fancy new Matt & Nat accessories* are launching a website on Monday. I use the third person, but really, since I am in charge of wrangling this damned freaky-deaky database and concomitant website, if feels like I am launching this website on Monday. Dude, it's stressing me out. The poor Beard has been patiently bearing the brunt of my short tempered "Fine, that's just fine, whatever. I don't care. I'm in a bad mood, you know" tantrums.

On the up side, I'm going on a date tomorrow night. With a boy! It feels very odd. But he's lovely and cute, and he asked. Hopefully I will not be a bitch on my date. Yes, it makes much more sense to save my vile bratty behaviour for my partner.

This makes for a very busy week, especially since Saturday is the Beard's birthday, which is going to involve some late night carousing for this early bird. All he's asked for this year is that I stay awake to close down the bar with him on Friday night/Saturday morning. Not much to ask, but my god, it'll take the most out of me.

*Matt & Nat, your logo sucks my ass. And not in the good, protected, "oooh, she's tossing my salad some good" kind of way. No. In the stupid unthinking heterosexist kind of way. But I got desperate and bought the wallet anyway, then picked off most of the MAN and WOMAN. Now I am the proud owner of a thread-trailing mummy wallet.

As an aside to this aside: "Oh, I can't believe I didn't think of that, and after my courses in women's studies!" as a initial response followed by total lack of any other response is not a good way of building business. I've been in women's studies courses with people like you, trying to decide whether it would be better to poke out my own eyes or yours.

Yeah, I know, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. I think I was sick over the holidays. Either that, or the family visiting wore me out so much I couldn't find the strength to do so anything but sloth for the rest of my time off. The Beard walked in here at one point and said "Jesus, your apartment's a mess." Considering that my (probably neurotic) need for order is one of the reasons we no longer live together, I was impressed he managed to say it without rancour. And it was no less than the truth.

In other news...

Once I thought I could live with bats. I found out this week I was kidding myself.

I hadn't done laundry since before Christmas, and here we were after New Year's. I take a load down to the basement, plonk it on the laundry table, start the cycle, scoop the soap, stick my arm into the machine and shake it shake it to distribute the detergent evenly. And then I check the tub. For what, I'm not sure. An errant sock, perhaps?

There was no errant sock, just a quivering mammal. The back of a brown furry mammal hanging upside down. I screamed like a girl. And believe you me, I've tried to find another way of describing the sound I made, but it was a high pitched, shrieky blast of "motherfucking hell what in the fuck is that in my machine?". The correct answer, my dears, is Myotis lucifugus, or one Little Brown Bat. The poor wee beastie only breathed a little faster after my scream.

After my reversion to stereotypcial femininity, I carefully closed the lid of the washing machine, marched upstairs, closed the basement door (uh, just in case the sick tiny bat managed to open the machine lid), and went straight to google. I was on the phone with the City of Ottawa in a few minutes, and after the two phone calls it took to assure Shelley from Bylaw that there was no way the bat came anywhere close to biting me, and an hour's wait, three bylaw officers were on my doorstep to rescue me from the creature with no intention of hurting me.

They took it away to be euthanized, a more humane death than freezing in a snowbank, the only death I could have offered it. At least according to the Humane Society webpage.

It's good to know what you can and can't live with. I've taken bats off the can-do list.

Today was my work's Christmas party. And it has everything to do with why I like my job, even when I'm need deep in the fucking useless freaky-deaky Plone database some smart-apple techie stuck us with. Motherfucker.

But that's fodder for another post.

So, why my job is great. By the time I left that party, I had signed on to collect recipes for the Potluck Cookbook Zine, I was full of booze and good food (that ginger glazed ham! the mushroom pie! o delicious red wine), and my face hurt from laughing so much.

And I get to put order to a thin slice of a crazy crazy world.

Anyway, the party was fun. We did one of those gift exchanges where you can either open a present or steal someone else's. I'd taken a venus envy gift certificate, which surprised the lesbian in the room (your best guess too). I thought it'd be a hot ticket, but no one really went for it. It got selected for one of the two women in the room least likely to ever darken the doors of venus envy. And no one stole it. Aie, I was cringing. I doubt it will ever be redeemed, though she seemed a little interested when I told her there are also lots of soap and bath products. Not just smarmy dirty sex toys. She and I are very different.

Anyway, this aft was a nice balm to my PMR fuck-up of the week. I hadn't read the instructions carefully and was trying to organize crash spaces for the crew going on the tour. Not my job, as it turns out. And apparently a lot of the stops got fucked up that way. So I got a righteously angry email from one crewmember. Pow, right in the kisser. Left me feeling a little demoralized and incompetent.

But then I got to ogle a lovely young coworker all afternoon, as he sprawled out on his side in front of the fire. He's young and makes me feel like a dirty old lady.
In a good way.

This evening will be topped off by a late late beer at the Aloha. I pick the Beard up at midnight. Here's hoping I don't end up asleep at the bar, schnozz in beer.

Yeesh. People and their spelling mistakes.

I'm having a lovely Saturday evening, waiting for my Beard to get off work at midnight. Supposed to be writing, but really, I'm cruising around the internet reading blogs, downloading music, trying to pick up boys and girls.

Limewire has become my new guilty pleasure. I feel kinda bad, because I am stealing music, and I, indie rock widow lo these past three years, should know how much musicians give up to put their music out. At least the musicians I want to download. Fugazi are not relaxing poolside, rolling in dirty corporate money. I assume, anyway.

My songlist is up to about 10 and I'm all excited like I just got myself a new toy, except this toy was free, which appeals to my tightfisted nature. And not only is it a free new toy, but it's a free new toy that surprises me every 3 minutes or so, because I've got a bunch of songs in there by groups I only sort of know. Like Mirah.

Mirah? Aie, and there's my problem. See, seems that some people think that Mariah is spelled m-i-r-a-h.

The next song starts with thumping bass. Hm, not the right bass tone for Fugazi or Against Me! Not syncopated enough for Kings of Leon. Too throbby for Mirah. Well, maybe it's that Yeah Yeah Yeahs song I couldn't remember having heard before.

And then *that voice* starts. Like someone jammed a needle in my ear, right into the pain centre. Or threw a spider at me.

Serves me right for not getting down to business and working on that new chapbook I should have done by the next decade.

Yeah, about that. Bye.

ps. I love Fugazi. I'd forgotten, but now I am going to go out and buy every album of theirs I can find. Oh! his voice! that round round bass sound! Soothes my soul.

I have been recovering, badly, from Saturday night. Even as a teenager, I was never really good at staying up late. After the hilotrons show on the 3rd, a bunch of us were up till 5 am. And have spent the rest of the week going to bed really early.

So no writing, and not much feeling clever.

But Saturday was one of the best nights in recent memory.

Not only did Hilotrons and boycrusher rock my ass, the reading went really well. We had a great, warm, friendly cute crowd, and people honestly listened - even to the first reader. Who was me. And I sold one chapbook.

A very funny moment at the after show party. Blake, a musician from around (and roommate the disliker of poetry and sex from another entry), came over and was obnoxiously drunk. He stumbled in, and after weaving around a bit, he plopped himself down on the floor in front of me and this very nice woman Jen that I'd been talking to. "Babes! Holy hot babeness! Look at you two!" &c &c he slurs at us. Jen fobs it off on me, I demur.

Blake hits a moment of prescient clarity. Looks me right in the eye and slowly says "You were ugly in high school and you never learned to take a compliment."

My jaw dropped. From nonsense to psychic truthsaying in the blink of an eye.

* cucumber
* celery

Sat Dec 3 2005

w/
Jennifer Whiteford
Sylvie Hill
Jess Carfagnini
Colin Vincent

The Manx, Frank & Elgin
5 pm

What a treat to read at the Manx! We got a big crowd out. Jennifer kept a poster, and I'm sad that I didn't. I read "I Used to Think You Were Hot, But Now I Know You," which got a big laugh because I mentioned Justin Haynes, and the Manx kids know him. I can't remember what else I read, though Andy was grateful I kept it clean.

There’s nothing like a bad system to wreck a fun time. How do people not realize this? How can a person enjoy herself when she’s worrying about what the fuck is happening? If she's worried that she's going to be missing the real fun by waiting in the wrong place or having done the wrong thing?

This past Saturday night in New York was a study in contrasts.

First, S and I went to a noodle restaurant called Republic. It was a visually stunning space: warehouse tall ceilings, pale paint, long narrow room, low pale wooden tables at front and back. A slate blue bar ran most of the length of the room – it framed the liquor at the front and the food at the back. The whole place hummed with people talking, waiters taking orders in murmurs, and kitchen staff banging pots around. We walked in and spent about 5 seconds figuring out what was going on and how to get in line before some efficient server or other spotted our confusion and signaled me to the right place. We were ushered to two spots at the bar with a fine view of the cooking. I loved this restaurant even before the menu arrived.

The staff put on a good show without doing anything out of the ordinary. They each had their own station. The guy in front of us was desserts: take the fudge cake out of the freezer, ditto the gelato, 1 scoop on, put dessert on deck. Put the gelato back. Take the white gelato, green gelato and the orange one out, scoop scoop scoop. Beautiful, each one. And I wanted green tea ice cream with every fibre of my body. Just to watch him make it into a perfect globe of sweet.

Across the way from desserts was wok. I could never really get the hang of what he was doing except that it seemed to involve way more fire and water and wire-brush scrubbing than noodle sizzling. He was graceful and economical in his movements.

All the staff had their assigned spots and stuck to them, perfect small motions keeping the whole machine in tune.

We left feeling calm and full of food and admiration.

And thank god we had a good base to start off with.

The next part of our evening must have been run by baby monkeys. We went to se Le Scandale (that’s Le SCAN-dal to you, bub, so don’t you dare get all Frenchy and scan-DAL-ey on me), a burlesque show that’s been running for months in the same back room of the same bar on the same street as it started in. Surely, adult monkeys would have had time to get some kind of system down pat by now.

First, we’ve called, and I’ve been told we can get tickets at the door. We get there early, 10ish, when the show is supposed to start at 1030. We can’t buy tickets and wait comfortably at a table. No, we have to wait till they open the door and pay then. We can’t put our names on a list and relax till they call our number. No, we have to mill around and wait till they open the door.

Well, by 1030, the club is packed full of suburbanites looking for a little titillating titty. And make that suburbanites WITH TICKETS. So by now, we’re in an ad hoc line up in a place there’s really no room for any kind of line up, getting jostled by anyone going to or from the bathroom. Or the bar. Or the mysterious back room. And it’s now 1045. People are restless, no one knows what the hell is going on, the door guy has been saying "About 20 minutes" for about 45 minutes to anyone who asks when it’s gonna start.

There was no way that show could have recovered from that crazy baby monkey system. It would have had to been a damn sight better than it was. It takes a really pretty and talented girl to make up for a wretched half hour of worrying about getting stampeded by people you categorically don’t like.

Up with Republic, down with The Scandal.

Setting off for NYC in 45 minutes. Can’t wait to leave. Been a shitty few days and I’ll be glad to leave Ottawa behind for a weekend. And a couple days off work. Ahh. My job is great, but a break is great.

Cafés, great restaurants, Shelley, walking. Gonna be a good time.

If the plane can leave the airport, that is.

I’ll tell all y’all a good story when I get back.