My three priorities these days are pretty much:

a) fretting about finding a new slack-ass part-time day job*;

b) making sure I see all the awesome people and places of Toronto before I'm sucked back into the snowy mid-continent limbo next-next-Wednesday**;

&

c) listening to terrible dance music, and watching fanvids set to terrible dance music.***

And in light of Article C, here is the only fanwork - based on a flitting search through AO3, anyway - that has really encompassed the whole of my [recent, undiluted, kinda weird] feelings about GOB Bluth of Arrested Development:

sdwolfpup's vid "For Your Entertainment".

( I can't even quote lyrics from this song, they are so ridiculous I get all embarrassed for whatever wretched soul wrote themCollapse )

Shit I've been doing:

01. working for free because one of my coworkers is stuck at home with a detached retina and - I CAN ONLY HOPE - an eye patch (they promise me lieu time, but they make me feel like a grubby non-salary part-timer for not automatically giving them 50 hours a week like everyone else: o hai, Gen Y entitlement; maybe I should just write 'pay me motherfucker' in sharpie across my forehead?)

02. writing epic Marcus/Esca hookerfics to end all hookerfics (that's a lie, it's only 5k but I am preeeeety jazzed about it nonetheless)

03. catching up on the internet (Dan Savage says prizing the relationship above sexual exclusivity is what we should all be doing which is why sometimes just thinking that man's name brings a tear to my eye)

04. half-assedly, uh, training for a 10k put on by some weirdo lady-spa next Sunday (there will be cupcakes, and manicures, and shrieking bitches in pink everywhere: it is stroller-friendly)

05. watching a lot of True Blood. 412 is downloading as I type.

( And can I just say [s4 reaction & spoilers]Collapse )


ETA, how could I forget: 05. listening to the new Beirut album on eternal never-ending repeat. THAT IS WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING. Because I think Zach Condon pays a lot of sex workers for chaste time and then writes about it. This is what his lyrics are telling me, oks?? BRB, WRITING HIM INTO MY HOOKERFIC NAO.

A couple of months ago I decided that I was too good for Groupon and unsubscribed. Then I resubscribed, bought a couple more, and now I'm kind of happy with them. I still hate the other ones, though: with their marketing-by-committee names and shitty copy. Groupon tries too hard, but at least it has a pretty hilarious video when you unsubscribe. Anyway, I take it all back. They were awesome to me.

( To wit:Collapse )


See? Nice folks! Reconsider your rising wave of boredom regarding them! In other news, I have yet to pick up Dance With Dragons (my new best favourite bookstore is too pretentious to carry it, so I'm waiting for it to come in: best of both worlds, amirite?) and week 3 of my three weeks of vacation in August is starting on Tuesday. Heading to the wilds of northern Vancouver Island to make sadfaces at out-of-work lumberjacks with truck balls, and hopefully find a movie theatre still playing Potter 7. Potter 8? Whatever. Potter Le Fin: Draco finds a hole to put it in. Whatever.

I am so exhausted, you guys. Being underemployed is hard. D:

The only shit I've been writing lately is what I'd like to term "practice bullshit" and the odd bit of non-fiction lameousity. I have a word doc that has a really, really old prompt that has something to do with anonymous craigslist sex (I am the expert, right?) but I don't even know what fandom I'm in anymore. The Eagle has some kind of challenge coming up, I think, and prompts always get my blood going, but I just don't care about anything right now. I spent an hour the other day trying to find stories I've written of the gen, het or femslash variety, and came up nigh-on empty-handed. I never knew I was so one-note. :/

Anyway. Now that Mr. Chan is going back to herd the children day-to-day, I'll have more boring-ass days to fill, and I am fucking thrilled about that. Lately all I've been doing is banging dudes and exercising, so some firm quiet time would be nice. Maybe I'll be so bored I'll wrap up some small-fandom WIPs just to clear them off my hard drive. Or catch up on S4 of True Blood. SOOKEH!

Mang, someone - actually, a beautiful stranger named dyaoka - recorded podfic for Helpmate, that Iron Man AU from three years back. INORITE. INO. She did it because someone else - another beautiful stranger named tanpopo03 - won her in the help_japan auction and requested it. What! So lovely! I don't even!

At any rate, dyaoka posted it here at amplificathon, if you're interested. I won't lie, I kinda can't listen past the first sentence! My ears are burning! I was so dumb three years ago! People who are my friends need to learn to keep me away from keyboards when I'm 23 and ovulating!


( Anyways, how have you guys been? WAT IS UP, FLIST?Collapse )

So, true fact: lj only allows you to go back 100 entries on your flist. Somehow I find this absurd and irritating even though I just did as much of a purge as I've ever done and my flist is now tiny, tiny, tiny because most of us barely/rarely post anyway and some of us have accidentally deleted our journals, baha, and yeah, I am not around, so who am I to complain?

I was dealing with/caused/lost my mind over a lot of changes and shifts and surprises within many different relationships last spring that made lj kind of a weird place to be. No offense to any parties to the various weirdnesses. I also picked up a therapist and a second boyfriend. Things have been much better since.

And/or maybe I'm just growing up and now spend too much time looking at mint.com to worry about lj. Or maybe I've realized how super boring I am when I whine. Etc, etc. I'm not going to worry about it too much because most of you have done the same thing (i.e., faded in and out) at some point, and life is cyclical and when my boss tells me that I should start a blog about how I have this secret baby-boomer mentality and am basically just a giant hypocrite when it comes to life goals, I tell him NO I AM DONE WITH THE INTERNET 4EVER and then realize in actualfax I am not, and will never be. And also that maybe I speak more honestly and openly to my boss than I do my father.

I spent last weekend reviewing workshop comments on my old short stories from 2006 and finishing My Last Piece of Fan Fiction Ever (12.5 months into my resolution to never write it again, um) and I am mentally preparing for consistently writing fiction for the first time in five years. Even though for the past six months all I've been able to write has been non-fiction and mostly about sex, at least I'm thinking about it. It is occupying a space. I have a table, I have some thoughts.

2009 was a year of external changes that ended with me miserable, and 2010 was a year of totally unplanned wacko internal changes that did me good, and now it's 2011 and I am going to use this to start working. I have half-succeeded in halting my slide down this godforsaken oiltown conformity spiral and now I'm going to claw my way back up until I'm at a height where I can see the mountains on the horizon again.

Also, I am going to bake an orange almond polenta cake to go with the plums I canned back in October, and then I'm going to serve both to my family for a belated holiday dinner.

I am trying to be back around again, even though it means I get a lot of flack for being antisocial from the hausfrau, who is on summer vacation and has only my poor wretched self for company at the end of the day. The rest of the time he spends cooking me dinner and feeding socks to the dog and brutalizing the back deck in the name of building stairs.

I am still working a lot, but between Owen doing all the chores and my having seriously fallen off the gym/running wagon (I really hate admitting it, but it's true: without a race to dread my motivation evaporates) I suddenly have time in the evenings. Also, he and his dad re-arranged the furniture so I have this nice cozy nook on my craigslist chaise in the front window, and I love sitting here and may as well spend the time being totally extra-unproductive while I'm at it. So! INTERNET, HELLO.

And I won't lie: burnthemap's outdoor stylings have kind of inspired me to beg for help with my own half-assed home decor projects.

( see, we have this one third of a hand-me-down card catalogueCollapse )

In conclusion: I need advice before I resort to consulting home decor bloggers from Edmonton who joke about calling their blog WhiteBaby.

So I've decided that I seriously need to get better at remembering shit I read. I think every conversation I have at some point incurs a sentence along the lines of, "Did you know that.... uh, well, I can't remember the numbers, but they say....[blah blah schoolchildren believe in domestic violence, blah blah grizzly bear mortality along back roads in BC, blah blah female earning power as a function of geographic mobility]." And I mostly sound like an idiot.

My old job involves reading about 20 books about snakes, the Aztecs, motocross, World War II, et cetera per day, and my new job involves reading every major Canadian newspaper three mornings a week. And yet I manage to grub conversation from neither. Conversation starters, maybe, but actual facts? Casual intelligence? Grace and skill? Not so much.

Although I do know that the new federal budget includes zero tax credits for capital-intensive wind farm projects and five hundred million for carbon capture subsidies for oil & gas. Fucking Harper.

ANYWAY. One day I'll be good at making conversation. I just need to learn some mnemumnemonic techniques. Until then I'll continue to stand in line at the coffee shop beside hot hipsters and have nothing to say to them. Oh, wait. That will happen regardless.

delighter and I took Lady Olive for a walk for two hours today. Things the dog tried to eat: a used kleenex, an apple core with about six cigarette butt smooshed on it from the gutter, some remnants of a pastry left exploded on the sidewalk in front of a starbucks, anything that was beside a garbage can. Then she pooped in the middle of 2nd street & 6th ave. High five.

I always really, really want to do nostalgic, hopeful, beautiful end-of-the-year posts like all you classy girls do, but jesus H if you all don't just prove that you can collectively and individually write about your lives in ways ten times as elegant and heart-wrenching as I could ever hope to. Basically at this point my End of 2009 post should actually be a "Best of End of 2009 Posts from my Flist" post. Also, it's the 4th so I am way late to the party. So I'll look forward instead of back, because one calms me whereas the other makes me nervous and fretful and sad.

( I made a lot of resolutions this year.Collapse )

So, in conclusion: why does it not count as extremely awesome fanart for an indierock vampire AU if it's artwork done to complement a Vampire Weekend album review for a local music rag? Because I am having a really hard time telling the difference. Little instruments! Fangs! Bleeding necks! Ezra Koenig! Oh my heart!

Today while we were on our way into the fifth stop on the local Artist Home & Studio Tour that delighter used her artistic connexxxions to get us in on, an angelic child stopped us.

Parentless, jacketless, blue-eyed and floppy-haired, this pre-pubescent kid chided gently: "Don't forget it's Earth Hour tonight at 8:30."

Don't worry, conscientious boy! I won't, thanks to you! I'm going to light some candles, pre-air-pop some corn kernels with some pre-melted butter and some pre-sprinkled nutritional yeast, and read some text in an ancient format.

It's gonna be sweet, in a then-I'll-turn-my-lights-back-on-and-brag-about-it-later kind of way. This is Alberta, after all.

PS. did you know that the energy associated with moving each MB of data around online is on par with burning a lump of coal? So says this dude, anywayz, in with his babble about models and libraries and other sundry:

Holy crap, this city loves St. Patrick's Day. On the drive/walk between the sushi place and my apartment, at 7pm, I saw:

• a pair of young long-locked gentlemen, one of whom copped a leprechaun accent and said "And a happy St. Paddy's day to you fine folks!" while doffing his hat in a practiced bow as he swept past. A google imagesearch for top of the mornin to ye yielded this fine fellow, who can stand in as a semi-accurate visual. Except the hat was a bowler and he was wearing a cape (?).
  
• a very angry-looking young lady in expensive 4 inch pumps and green and white wide-horizontal-striped tights, stalking down the street towards whatever faux-pub might stand to serve her green beer.
  
• a young lady smoking outside of Bob the Fish in American Apparel kelly green piped running hot pants and matching soccer socks: considerably less sexy than these pictures would imply. But who am I to judge? I'd just go for the cranberry/army, amirite?
  
• a herd of street-crossing pubgoers: anywhere else in this city stepping off the sidewalk is guaranteed to get you mowed down like a blade of uppity grass, but in my neighbourhood? The drunks rule with sloppy iron fists.
  
• a guy in a floppy Guinness hat, also drunk: I flipped him the bird because Guinness fucking sucks;
  
• a girl in a plastic green hat on her way out of the house (she bought this thing? she kept it all year and busted it out now? she's not going to keep it in her bag till she gets a few pints in her?);
  
• a staggeringly drunk girl in white cargo pants and a cut-off green linebacker top, toddling down the street with some guy, plastered while still in broad daylight. They stopped for a long moment on the street corner as we were turning into our place, and I had to say to Owen, "Keep your eyes on the road, I promise I'll tell you if she pukes."
  

In conclusion, everyone is drunk. High five, Calgary.

So, in news more relevant to the internet, I'm halfway through Watchmen and I just watched Brideshead Revisited, which tore my heart out and ripped it up and now my pulse-pounding lust for Matthew Goode as a various assortment of canon-gay or canon-willing-to-fake-gay-if-necessary characters ( is busting up my uterus something awful.Collapse )