Skirting the Mundane

One thing I failed to mention about the gimped social anxiety syndrome is that it disappears once she is out the door, and she struts around in heels and a trenchcoat like a real rock'n'roll loser. Okay, I'm sorry that I hesitated to go out. I dealt with my anxieties by passing out on the bed for ten minutes (woo!) and then made a hasty pasta dinner (rather than a pasty hasta dinner). Then we went out to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and it was AMAZING. Good news! There are people out there with dirtier minds than mine! It was absolutely awesome. You know the part in "Time Warp" where the chorus goes: "but it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insa-a-a-a-a-a-ane"? During the "a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ane", everybody yells "group sex! Group sex! Group sex!" And there were some really hardcore people sitting behind us, who had come up with these really brilliant lines and mostly had good timing, too.

My personal favourite for the night? The mist clears on Dr. Frank-n-Furter in the pool and everyone yells, "Waiter! There's a transvestite in my soup!"

Jessica seems to have some form of gimped social anxiety syndrome. She is enthusiastic about going out, until about one hour before she is supposed to go out, and then she begins freaking out and not wanting to go. What is wrong with her?

Note: Lunar eclipses are significantly more awesome than they appear in pathetic amateur photographs.

Le Sexy = Le Legs Flying Everywhere.

Sorry, Becks, but you knew this had to happen eventually. You can't just do stuff like that and expect it not to turn up on the Internet.

Let's pretend: You are some random university student, and you have a significant other. Where do you choose to mack hardcore on said other?

Hint: The correct answer is not "in front of a large plate-glass window at ground level, so as to burn out the eyes of passersby at the sight of your tongues".

Thanks, Random Making-Out Couple. You have scarred me for life, though perhaps not in the same magnitude as Ho 1's neighbours' have. (see: June 20th post. Then scream.)

I have The Power! See how the amazing Jessica adds links and finally gets her Haloscan and Bravenet buttons to line up nicely with each other!

Please don't laugh, Pixie... I have not your genius. Yet.

Oh when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Yeah, I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life

Ain't no use in complainin'
When you got a job to do

That's what this summer was. Even with all the different music we listened to -- from Beyonce's great classic "Naughty Girl" to Meatloaf's excellence to Boney M and the Ma Baker Dance -- "Summer of 69" is still the one that says it. "Those were the best days of my life". I don't even remember if we listened to it that much, but no other song inspires that happy-sad tightening in the chest and windpipe, not wanting to cry over good things but realizing that some good things are gone forever. There will be other good things, but they won't be suffused with golden light and blanketed with the comfort of summer evenings the way the good things of this summer were. It won't be the same. I seem to be saying that a lot these days, that "it won't be the same". And it won't. We're all changing, and we may not exactly lose each other, but I don't know if we'll find each other in quite the same way again. And it wasn't perfect, by any means. I had a shitty job and there was crying and fighting, but it was us and it was ours. There are some things I will never forget.

I will never forget Motherfucker and Nazareth. Holy fuck, man.

I will never forget the "Long and Loaded" footlong hot dog sign.

I will never forget falling down the mountain and getting filthy and the K-Squared laughing hysterically at me, or Katie and me flaring the camping stove and needing Keith to rescue us from fiery death.

I will never forget Juan, who "cannot go on".

I will never forget the bear and the mushrooms.

I will never forget Rebecca who cycled across Canada.

I will never forget Hobonia: CHEESE and HI IAN! and "The Great Escape: The Game".

I will never forget the wolf with the red roses.

I will never forget D&D.

I will never forget the mosquitoes and the electrical storm.

I will never forget the fun and the heat and dust and the shitty shale track at the Summer Games.

I will never forget Katie and Becca and Nathaniel playing at grad.

I will never forget "American Pie".

I will never forget the moment I realized that nothing can last forever.

But there ain't no use in complainin', when you got a job to do. I can still think that this French project is the dumbest assignment I have ever had.

So, here's the thing about Jacob: He made me late.

Not like that.

For heaven's sake, if you even thought that, then I would like you to know that you are very wrong indeed. Also, you are exactly as dirty as I am. But that's not the point. In the week or so that we have been "officially" going out, he has made me late for a midterm exam (aaaaaah!) and a project meeting. And maybe the first one was worse, but it was also more my fault. The second one, on the other hand... well, I knew I had to be back at noon. I told him so. I was assured that we could get back from running downtown to get petits pains au chocolat in time. We got back at 12:45 and it's a good thing the people in my group are so forgiving, because they had good reason to be extremely angry with me. And we know that I alone am usually disorganized enough for two people.

It's a little different since I got here, though. I'm finding that I absolutely need to have my shit together because there's nobody to look after me and get shit done. A valuable lesson, but it is certainly making me less fun to be around.

Tests are still fun.
You are Maureen Dowd! You like to give people silly
nicknames and write in really short, non
sequitur paragraphs. You're the most playful of
the columnists and a rock-ribbed liberal, but
are often accused of being too flamboyant and
frivolous. You tend to focus on style over
substance, personality over politics. But your
heart is in the right place. Plus, you are a
total fox.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Haha... tests are fun.

Disorder Rating
Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Moderate
Antisocial: Low
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: Moderate
Avoidant: Moderate
Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: High

Isn't self-diagnosis exciting? I am a bag of tics! (Not ticks, mind you).

It's now a lie that Indra and I don't talk. We did a bit of studying for history together last night and got to chatting quite a bit. Hooray for bonding!

Aside from the occasional scandalette, my life is very quiet these days. Depressingly so, actually. Laura has been regaling me with tales of her frat-party fun, and Becca is making all kinds of awesome friends, and I have continued to Sit. It's one of my primary activities now, sitting. This is what I get for failing to sign up for stuff, I guess. I also need to find a choir, stat, because I am losing whatever mad singing skillz I had.I have been studying like a studying person for poli-sci, econ, and history, as I have midterms three consecutive days this week, starting Tuesday. BAH! But there is some good/exciting news: my old buddy Renee is in town today and tomorrow, and I'm planning on doing a West Wing marathon with Jacob today. Actually, I should call him about that. Marching off...

Heh.

You are Mackerelly!! You feel obligated to create
new words just to define yourself as
different... I mean diff-tacular. Just
remember... ORIGINAL doesn't necessarily mean
GOOD.


What Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974 are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The Holy Elvis Confessional! It's very, very funny.
I am freaking out a little bit over my poli-sci essay, but it'll be okay. I have four of the five sources I am supposed to have. Now I just have to read them and write the paper. Yoiks.
And my life, other than that, is okay. Going home for Thanksgiving was a mixed blessing -- the sheer fabulousness of home and friends made me want to stay forever. The chance to relax against other people's strength for a few days (and have somebody else do my laundry) seems to have made me weak. I actually feel less confidently independent than I did before Thanksgiving.
This week's lesson: It is possible to make it to economics for 10 a.m. even if you only wake up at 9:40. Particularly if considerate people produce home-made banana bread for you upon your arrival (thanks, Jacob!).

The Bermuda Triangle: Had an interesting MSN conversation today with a person who, for the sake of blathering on, we will call Mike. His own weblog has just recently demonstrated the habitual inefficacy of talking about people in code: The people involved always know you are talking about them and nobody else has a clue. So Mike he is.
Mike thinks Jacob and I are going out, a fact of which I myself am not sure. Though certainly other people seem to think we are. Mike also seems to have developed a certain affection for me. For instance, he reads this blog, as well as my other one, though interestingly is lurking rather than posting comments (not that most of y'all don't do that too!). Anyway, I didn't know he felt that way, because... well, come on. When do I ever know these things? So there's a whole big Triangle thing going on where I don't actually want to hurt anybody's feelings because both of hte honourable gentlement involved are very awesome and neither deserves to be hurt. As I said, Mike and I had a bit of a talk today on MSN in which it came out that I know exactly what he's talking about on his blog. He seems to be okay with being friends. But then, it's easy to "seem" on MSN. Heaven knows I have "seemed" okay or annoyed or whatever many times when I have not been. But it's a start.
And I want to have it all. I want to have lots of friends and (I think) I want to go out with Jacob and I want to be very happy and I want to work in Anne McLellan's office.
Oh, yeah. I talked to our Deputy Prime Minister the other day, on the plane home, and she was very personable and claimed to remember me from when she spoke at AGP. She said I should call her office, whatever that means. Hooray?
It's time to WORK now. Farewell, controversy, hello economics!

Kahlua Mudslides: two.
Friends seen: at least fifteen.

Oh, what have I gotten myself into? Going home for Thanksgiving was wonderful, but it may have been a mistake because it reinforced all that I am missing being gone. My family and my friends, my good little dog, et cetera, et cetera. The drab little suburb from which I hail is full of things that are beautiful to me. Hopefully I will only value these good things more with absence. There were some weird and/or bad-but-useful things as well as many good ones, and I think I'll dispense with the bad ones first. Here we go: What I Did This Weekend.

It was very weird to see El Tomato again. He was working at the hobby shop (as he does) and his hair was much longer than I remembered, and has some very stylish brown/red highlights, darker than my hair colour but similar. My mind in its infinite perversity made him look very good to me, because it knew I couldn't have him. Then I wandered around feeling guilty that I was such a terrible girlfriend towards the end. Really, for the last month I was treating our relationship like it was already over, and by acting that way I made it so. But all that's whatever under the bridge, I guess. He wasn't as distant as I could have forgiven him for being (and since I'm doing economics right now, I'll say that that counts as "surplus consumer value" of distance -- even if there had been a higher amount of distance, it would not have affected me). And we played blackjack with his work friends and his boss, and they didn't make faces at me like "Oh, you're the psychobitch Tom told us about. You really do have close-set eyes, don't you?". So it could have been worse.

And then the next day, Saturday, Laura and Becca and I went to do the saddest thing I have ever done. Well, first we went to Save-On and bought up their bulk candy section. Then we went to the cemetery. Since the name hasn’t been graven on the stone yet, we found Luke by means of a ceramic mushroom placed behind the stone by Becca's thoughtful parents, and then we stood and sat and cried and thought for a long time. Even in a hug, we are always alone, even when we want to melt and be mixed around in some kind of paint can of souls. It is a tough world in which to be a discrete unit, and so I’m grateful that we have good friends right now. Nobody is alone, because even in our absolute loneliness, in the deepest reaches of our own darkness, we know there are other people in the same darkness. Even if they are across the world, they are down there in their own parallel abysses. It is not actually a hand up, but it is somewhat comforting. So we sat. We left the flowers (burgundy, because it would annoy him) and one of the crustily delicious gummy worms we’d bought. I left a copy of the “In Dreams” lyrics, because they are beautiful and remind me that it might take a long time, but I’ll probably see them both down the road. And I think we can agree that if Luke and Steph ain’t goin’ to heaven, ain’t none of us goin’ neither.

It has been almost exactly a year since I met Luke, at Lori’s birthday party. If you had told me last year that a year later we would be looking for his name on a tombstone I would flatly not have believed you. While I was at home, Laura asked me for one of my grad pictures, and I had a search around in the little bag of them for a blank one. I pulled out one I’d written out for Luke but never given to him. It says something like “I’m looking forward to being friends even when we are old and wrinkly and wet ourselves” and now it just doesn’t seem fair. The long-haired girl in the picture is smiling and waiting for good things. She’s nervous and busy but not sad. And as of September 5, she’s dead, too. The short-haired girl who killed her is edgy and lazy, but putting on a good show of being very happy. And she is very happy, when she’s around people who need her to be very happy or who would lose interest if she weren’t. She’s irritable because work-wise she’s behaving badly and knows it. She is, above all, more frightened than the long-haired girl. She is frightened of living and of dying, and in both of these she is frightened of losing. I don’t want to lose my memories, to time or to sadness, and I am terrified that their deadness will bleed backward through all of the things that I know of them, and that eventually they will have been dead all along, and that then it will start bleeding forward as well, so that everyone is just a dead person waiting to happen. That may be unpleasantly like the truth, but I don’t want to live for dying.

I said I was going to talk about the good things, didn’t I? Well, that may well be a lie. I don’t know. I had fun, and now that I’m back in Ottawa I miss the fun and I miss the people I had fun with, so it’s all seeming a little hollow right now.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my one-third. I think that for this week, I will try to run at least 20 km by next Tuesday, and share the Love Actually love with at least one person. That will be exertion enough, particularly as I have midterms to study for. Oh, fuck. I have just wasted the five hours since my classes ended. And I just keep doing that. I just… sit here. I don’t actually do anything anymore. Wasn’t it this time last year that I was getting everything together and participating in all kinds of stuff, instead of sitting?

I want to go home.

Handy Poster in Res Commons Hallway: The Residence Association's Parliament Hill Volunteer Program - Wanna work where the Prime Minister works? (Deadline: September 26).

The Parliament Hill program. As in half the reason I came to Ottawa.

September 26. As in last week.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

You know, I'd forgotten how much fun a good cross-country race can be. It was really quite great, despite the fact that I need to learn to run hills. And rocks. It was pretty crazy stuff. But I had an awesome time anyway, and didn't finish as badly as I was fearing I would; I wanted to keep my time under an hour and, in fact, finished in exactly 54:19. Hooray!

On the bad side, though, I did have to walk quite a bit because the downhills freaked me out (Prairie girl!) and the uphills exhausted me. We don't have rocks like that back home. Really, portions of it reminded me of the scramble I did with the K-Squared this summer. But the last section was nice... it went downhill.

I have so much work to do. Why? Because I'm lazy. This has been a most unproductive weekend, so far. Except Jacob burned me a Finger Eleven CD, so all is well. I have my music, my Western alienation, and my insane dead Greeks making up rules about the procreative policy in their imaginary city. Joy!

To paraphrase C.J. Cregg, "Wow, am I stupid!" Here is the chain of events for the past couple of days...

Wednesday: First Public Affairs tutorial. Kinda cool, our T.A. is a total geek. He thinks Tolkien based the races in Lord of the Rings on the progression of argument styles in Plato's Republic. ROCK ON, GEEK MAN DENIS! But yeah. There was a guy, Jacob, sitting next to me who turns out to have lived in Edmonton for his first twelve years or so and is an avid cross-country runner. So we're talking afterwards and he asks me if I want to help him start a varsity team, and of course, I'm all, "hell, yeah!", doing that Jessica thing where I talk a good show and then don't show up. Don't try to tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.

Thursday: I missed my history lecture Wednesday due to the evil bus drivers (see last post) so today is the day to make it up. ROCK ON, WORLD WAR ONE! Really, it's a cool war, just in terms of morbidity. On the way, I promised Bharkha I'd go out with a bunch of the girls to Hull for Mallory G's birthday (once again, that Jessica thing where I talk a good show and... you know the rest). Talked to Jacob, Army Mike, and Bandanna Steph after class, and we were the Motormouth Four for the better part of an hour. Then we were the Motormouth Three, because Steph had to go back to res and, you know, work and sleep. Et cetera. By this time, I figured the birthday party to Hull had left. We repaired to the Oasis and then to my floor's study lounge/TV room, telling our amusing stories quickly and playing for laughs, in the manner lonely people who are new in town and/or whose friends have left. Then, about midnight or one (don't remember!) Mike left to go home. By a weird coincidence, his house is right by the Cuban Embassy where I spent an hour pacing up and down, cursing and unsuspiciously writing stuff on a clipboard Wednesday. Damn the late #5 bus! Jacob and I sat and talked till 3:30 in the morning. He beat me in a debate on missile defence, a fact which ashames me. But let's just bear in mind that I had had an eleven-hour day of classes, and that Dirty Peacenik Jessica doesn't have any weapons knowledge mojo to throw down.

Friday: Bharkha says she is going to make me come to Hull tomorrow night, since I skipped out last night. Now, I like Bharkha, but behind that sweet little voice there is a core of scary woman-steel. That said, I don't really want to go because I am both underage and a sissy. I can't claim "overworked" because I'm avoiding work with a zeal normally reserved for... well, for work.
But yeah. Long story short, I'm doing a 10km cross-country race tomorrow.

Up a ski hill.

And through the woods.

And over the hardcore crazy rocks and "intense technical work" of the Canadian Shield.

Did I mention 10km?

Or that I'm going rock-climbing Monday?

Or that I am shortly going to be living in a world of pain, glorious pain?

ROCK ON, WORLDS OF PAIN!