Okay, I'm going out to get a movie in FIVE minutes ... Quick, what should it be! Comments section.
I just feel very in love right now, and very blessed because of it. Last night Matt and I fell asleep folded into each other as always, knees curled into the backs of legs and chins on shoulder grooves etc, and he said how happy he was that this was this and not the way this was six months ago, and I agree, I'm not sure how so much can change in just half a year but it did and I'm so glad.
Matt and I started up the ol' Share Organics thing again -- this week's box came with:
- a pommegranate
- apples
- many oranges
- a lemon
- potatoes
- a cucumber
- bananas
- cauliflower
- tomatoes
- an avocado
- portobello mushrooms
- local salad mix
Hurrah! This is a great service, and I recommend it to anyone in Victoria, particularly if there is more than one person living in your household -- the cost is $27 a week and is perfect for two people to split. The only disadvantage is that you will no longer buy produce when at the supermarket. Why is this a disadvantage? Because, if you are like me, you take a great swelling pride in laying out your purchases on the supermarket conveyor belt, and look from the corner of your eye to make sure all the other customers have noticed your enlightened selection of tofu, soy milk, carrots, yams, beans, avocados, broccoli, garlic, and red onions. You eye their own selections -- bacon, sausage links, condensed milk, ice cream bars, canned spaghetti, tinned beans, pop, and frozen corn -- and hope they feel a dutiful sense of shame. ... So if you're getting all your produce delivered to your door, sometimes you can't do that. But if it doesn't hurt sometimes to be a fashionable food shopper, I pose this question: is it even worth it?
... Of course, my cool food selections are usually tarnished when I also throw in cigarettes, and trashy magazine, and Coke to mix with whiskey. Flashback to Nanaimo a couple of years ago, standing in front of the Cambie at closing time with a mickey of rye in my purse: "Does anyone around here know where I can get any Coke?" Immediately surrounded by three or four "gentlemen of the evening," hands in pockets, twisting their little baggies and asking how much I was willing to spend.
(I often go to The Friday Five and answer the questions therein on this blog. But sometimes the questions are boring, alarmingly so. Henceforth, today I clicked on the 'submit-your-own-ideas-for-the-next-friday-five' link. I doubt this will ever make it to the main page, but decided to answer them here.)
1) What is the first alcoholic beverage you ever drank?
Smirnoff vodka. I chugged a half-mickey of the stuff because I was going to a party and had run out of weed. No one believed it was my first time, even though I started yelling, and speaking to people I did not know.
2) What is the most memorable experience you have ever had while under the influence of an alcoholic beverage?
The booze cruise, with Trev and Steve-o in the spring of 2000. I had just read "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac -- I was 18 -- and said to Trev, "I'd love to go hitchhiking one day." He said, "Okay." The next day the three of us went to Salt Spring Island, armed with beer, butterscotch liquor, red wine, sambuca, and limon rum. We were nearly thrown off the 9 am ferry. Things progressed from there.
3) If you were an alcoholic beverage, what would your ingredients be? Also: shaken, or stirred?
Gin, sangria, and peach juice. Stirred, with ice. This probably goes without saying.
4) Which alcoholic beverage do you hate with all your being, and why?
Now, hate is a strong word ... But perhaps tequila. Few things can get me embarassingly drunk after only three shots, but tequila does it.
5) If you had $1000, which alcoholic beverage would you stock your pantry with?
Every different variety of gin. Every. Also champagne, for mix.
You're most attracted to hair. You value wisdom,
understanding, and knowledge.
Which part of the body are you most attracted to?
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So the no-confidence vote went through! What does this mean! My take: I think we will have two months of being forced to endure slimy photos of Stephen Harper, listen to mud-slinging and fixed polls, and then face exactly what we have now: a Liberal minority government. I think it's a waste of time and money. I'll be voting NDP again, and the one interesting part about all this will be to see if the NDP gain more seats this time round. Layton has shown himself in recent weeks to be rather charismatic and leader-oriented -- he was instrumental in this downfall of the Liberals -- and my understanding is that this quite surprised a lot of people. Whether or not voters take this into account on voting day remains to be seen, but it will make for intereting bets. Yes -- new plan -- I want to host an Election Day Betting Pool, yes, double or nothing!
Yesterday at work somebody put fake poop on the staff toilet seat only it was very realistic fake poop and there was much drama and chaos -- yes, I was the one who found it -- and the neat thing is I have never seen fake poop before, ever, not once in my life.
Re: housewarming party -- setting my hair on fire, complete with that awful burnt-hair smell; hugging a lot of people; showing my University Degree around the Drinking Table to much laughter and joking; shrieking out spoken-word with a bunch of musicians I didn't know and realizing they were stealthily trying to edge away from me; giving up and going to bed.
I bought some tarot cards and a book. Have done two "readings." I want to become very good at it because it seems like an interesting way to blend mysticism and therapy while using tools like intuition and problem solving skills ... We'll see. There's so much to memorize.
Apparently the Student Loan people will start clawing money away from my chequing account tomorrow. I still haven't spoken to them about it; this is all hearsay. All I hope is that the rent cheque doesn't bounce. Need to start getting more on top of things; need to start following all of the lists I relentlessly write.
Thirty-six empty bottles of beer on my table this morning, along with three bottles of wine. I haven't counted the other areas of the house yet. The pain I feel all over is very great.
Also two cameras, one a polaroid. A photograph of Big Bad Ben magnetted to the fridge.
Joy: Baguette. Baguette, slapping me.
Ben: I can't stop swaying, swearing, or grabbing ass. I am the American White Male.
Matt Bulford: Sometimes when I am alone I beat off - usually to a photo of Carmen Electra or Rev. Baker. For the most part it feels good, but there are times when it is less satisfying. For example,
- When J Leto starts a band with a shitty name
- When Salman Rushdie looses his nerve because he has freedom
- When M & A Olson are not in good standing
I am eligible - young ladies come-a-runnin' 381-4077 ask for Sheena Easton
Ryan:
I'm going to wander over and pull the cleft into a g scale, thanks. I wish I could read both clefs.
Michael J.com:
me: hello movable type
mt: hello luser
me: please stop with the spam
mt: i'll try, but you have to pay for an upgrade or feed me plugins
me: i can't afford to buy more of you, and they don't write plugins for you
me: grow the hell up, eh?
mt: that will be $1300.
me: you suck
mt: tough kakka.
me: i used to like you, but i think i might like wordpress more
mt: ah no! not my nemesis!
me: yes, and you'll be gone! i fed you a database, it made you happy
me: i fed you users, that helped,
mt: lusers! ha!
me: but I'm not putting money in your greedy little belly.
mt: there is no spoon.
And so euphoria ignites.
If only I didn't have to do laundry so often. And other chores.
Listening to: Elliott Smith
Drinkin: rye
Tonight: tidy the place up, make a marvelous African yam and peanut soup for the potluck tomorrow; make some more calls about said potluck; eat dinner; and something else. I forget. Damn. It's probably a dvd that needs returning. I think my shining achivement in the past year is to have lived in three different neighbourhoods and racked up astronomical late-movie fees in each one.
Went to a writing thing in Vic West last night with a new group of people, including Eucharis of web-log fame. Described Sheri-D Wilson as the kind of woman straight-girls want to fuck. There were cookies!
I think the worst way to die would be to have your hands repeatedly slashed at with a box-cutter.
Today at work someone asked me if I was 'religious' and I replied that I was more of a 'free agent.' What does that even mean?
A lot of fun. A little psycho, but hey..that's
never a bad thing! (chill out sometimes though,
it's good for you)
Are you a blast to be around? or do you just SUCK?
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sorry but u r the biggest LOSER ever...(me:don't
hurt me)
R U Hot Enough? (Girls Only plz) (pics)
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It's interesting to me that if you google "Ben Isitt" my blog comes up before his official site.
My throat is itchy from wearing the sequinned top all day. But it was an argyle sequinned top, which makes the rash that will develop oh-so worth it.
Working on a project about tyrants and dictators and fascists. Shorts and prose poems so far.
1. What do you do for fun?
Fun? Fun? I'm not allowed to have fun; I've got six mouths to feed and the mortgage to pay off and that damn fence to fix and money doesn't grow on trees, you know. Or: over-indulge in gin, go for brunch with people, take photographs, read trashy magazines, read highbrow magazines, read Canadian fiction, walk, walk with my discman, have sex with Matt, argue I mean talk with Matt, fantasize about life as the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine, host potlucks, cook, smoke cigarettes on my front stoop, watch and deconstruct films, watch Lost, watch bad movies at the Roxy, clack about on my new typewriter (christened Eva), play with Sambuca, shout with friends, think.
2. Is there a person from your past you would like to talk to again, even if it would be a potentially painful conversation?
There are a number of very talented actor-writer types I knew in high school and who I have lost touch with that I'd love to speak to again. In case they're in the habit of googling their names, they are: Katie Brennan, Keri Cameron, Kelly Clarke, Ryan Parker, and Brad Prince.
3. What is your favorite comfort food?
Stoned wheat thins with smoked salmon cream cheese.
4. What is your preferred form of self-expression? (Do you dance; or express yourself through music, conversation, etc.)
Well I certainly don't express myself in conversations very well. I'm more of a saxaphone player.
5. You just received $5000; what do you spend it on?
In a perfect world, the electronic materials necessary to set up a publishing house. In the real world, like a sixth of my student loan.
Today I tripped on a flat surface and workmen laughed at me. I had been admiring their marvelous machine: it had two very large spools -- spools bigger than me -- which had colourful wires threaded around them, and which were spinning slowly.
I watched the Paris Hilton sex tape last night. Odd. I found myself obsessing over her stomach -- it is perfectly flat, very sexy, yet with no muscles, which means she didn't get it by working out, she was just born with it. Heiress indeed.
Drinkin: Coffee
Listening to: the Flaming Lips
Last night I scibbled in my notebook at the antique oak table while World's Fattest Racehorse bellowed and rehearsed in the living room. They did a cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walking" and declined to join me for cigarettes. The senseless fear and trust involved in writing down one sentence, two, even though they are bad, even though you know as you are writing them that you'll never use them again ... God, it's like I'm learning how to fucking write all over again only this time I'm wearing a safety harness and all the other writers are laughing at me. At least I'm getting words down. I have missed the pleasure of desecrating white pages with ink; it feels like a very violent form of making love, only I'm the one with the phallus. Writing is supposed to be very yang, very masculine, and while I know we're all composites I feel rather cheated and wish I was more yinny -- is yinny a word? -- and had vagina symbols in my life such as flowers or pumpkins and not these long thin pens and what-not. Criminy. Get over the image!
I've been playing this thing for Sambuca -- it's called Dog Cat Radio and is supposed to be left on to keep lonely little cats and dogs company at home while their owners are at work all day. But it's all 80s jock-rock, and Sam hates it. I hate it too. I think it was designed for boy-cats with small penises.
Drinkin: Pilsner
Listening to: Blackalicious
I saw my stalker the other day. He's not my stalker anymore, but there was a brief period when I was 18 -- he was 40 and we worked together, then he was fired under mysterious circumstances and all he left behind was a mix-tape for me -- care of the manager who had fired him -- along with his phone number and address. He followed me around for a bit after that. The moral of the story is: one of the songs on the mix tape was Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is to Love? which remains one of my favourite songs.
Ben's coming over tonight to gnash over blank pieces of paper and stare at the tips of our pens hoping for magic. I want to do another zine comprised entirely of creative works composed on surfaces other than notebook or computer paper -- I'm thinking napkins, backs of envelopes, mad discrepancies scrawled on public walls and then photographed. I recognize this is my most pretentious idea to date, but I'm intrigued.
You are the The Notebook kiss!
Which Movie Kiss Are You? (With Pics!!!)
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- I hope so, anyway. I purchased a yellow typewriter on Saturday. Yellow.
The other day the lover and I made dinner together. He chopped jalopeno peppers. Fast-forward an hour: getting it on, if you know what I mean -- clothes flying all over the bedroom, some kind of ridiculous Pakistani dance music on the radio. The foreplay is in full swing as he starts giving me a hand job, and I --
*EXCRUCIATING PAIN*
-- don't want to say anything because talk about killing the mood, and I'm like maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just not into it, but I am is the problem, and I finally blurt out --- Er --- Did you wash your hands after chopping the peppers?
It turns out he had -- my man is not grubby -- but the festivities ended and I think I wound up talking about it too much.
Suddenly I own a tight shirt, with sequins.
Other accomplishments: made homemade tomato pasta sauce from scratch with tomatoes, yams, garlic, onions, basil, oregano, and a bay leaf; haven't sipped a drop in two days; am writing again, in excruciatingly slow but rather exciting increments.
I've been writing a lot of letters to people lately. A postcard to my parents ("Mother and Father: I am not dead. But Bob Dylan is playing -- why? -- and I have 24 rejection slips.") To Ben, explaining that there was no housewarming. To Morgan, because she is beautiful and I had brand-new stamps. A love letter to Matt, half to say I loved him and half so that he can have proof-of-address on municipal election day, which is this Saturday. I'm going to vote for Ben Isitt, as usual. He isn't even 30! A letter to the Malahat Review informing them of my address change. A manuscript and SASE to sub-TERRAIN. What this means, obviously, is that I still have no phone.
When you don't update for a week you'd think there would be all these fabulous things to tell, but I'm coming up blank. A list, I guess:
1) Still no phone/internet. (really?) I opened the library to get to this public terminal just now, very embarassing -- stood with a mob outside, at least a hundred people, smoking various things. Budged in line so that I'd be sure to get a computer.
2) Cancelled the housewarming party on Friday cuz we have no phone and couldn't call people. Ben was the only person we'd told, and it wasn't definite, but we wrote him a letter anyway, on Friday at 8:30 pm, to let him know. Went off to mail it and apparently this is when he stopped by. Damn and blast!
3) I have written two pages of a new work. Two. This is more than I have written in seven months.
4) The real reason I am at this public terminal is to do line edits for "Age," now retitled "Do You Want to be an Old Maid, Emma?" and print it off and send it out to subTerrain. Despite our rocky past.
5) I got Jeopardy for PC!
6) Also a cigar box, in which I will place letters to God because I am better at communicating through writing than speaking or thinking, and a mustard-coloured hat that Matt says makes me look like a socialist underground newspaper editor slash agitator from the 1940s.
7) Had brunch at Floyd's today, with my favourite waitress -- another Matt quote -- "the Beyonce of waitresses."
8) Drank a lot of rye on Friday and read Henry Miller. He's my new favourite bad boy intellect. Rawr. Sexy even in senior citizenry! Dead now, of course. ("We all die .... I believe I am the luckiest person ...")
9) Saw "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Wedding Crashers" at the Roxy on Wednesday. Ate a japanese orange and guffawed a lot. Both movies rather lowbrow, by turns sexist and homophobic and filled with a kind of "vibrant new male fuck yas all" posturing, but good. Perhaps more men need to be witty scoundrels? Perhaps? Fine, but not my man.
10) My favourite Tom Waits quote of the moment: "He says he came from someplace called Mayor's Income, Tennesee ..."
11) And Bjork: "I don't know my future after this weekend ..."
12) And Tom Waits again, from "Short Cuts": "Aw yeah honey, an egg sandwhich with a broke yolk!" Yeah!
13) Must do the line edits now. Then buy stamps, and write a cover letter. Make soup.
I've been running around town making calls from a lot of different pay phones. It's sketchy. I like not having a phone; I don't really want to get one. But I probably will. Tomorrow.
I bought a Scrabble board game today! Excitement mounts! My grandmother, you heard it here first, is probably the world's greatest Scrabble player. She gets hundreds and hundreds of points.
Saw Melinda and Melinda last night, which left me a little crestfallen. It wasn't very good. The jokes were expected and the should-have-been-charming neuroses of the characters was like limp celery or carrots that have been placed in cups of water for science experiments and then forgotten. One of the characters was a neo-feminist filmmaker who was working on a project with a title like The Castration Sonata or something like that and it made me yearn, yearn, for the days when neo-feminist Woody Allen characters work on projects with titles like Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction. Yearn.
Two new firsts:
1) Sex on the floor in front of a roaring fireplace.
2) Knee-high argyle socks.
It rains, and I spent $15 on socks.
Meeting Ben for brunch in half an hour. Meeting Eucharis and co. this evening at 7:30 for writing, and I'm terrified because it means meeting new people and I may giggle, which happens to me sometimes, during stressful situations.
My hands are cold from being rained on. I also smell like sheep because my woollen skirt got rained on, too.
It is at this point when I begin to reconsider updating; look at my options -- delete it all?
No, I want a record that I smell like sheep in a public place.
Got photos developed yesterday and I look fat in all of them. No honest pictoral representation of me exists: I either look fat and/or the carrier of some dire social disease -- usually when Ryan Steele takes the pictures -- or I look marvelous and sexier than in real life. Anyhow, the point is, I had to tear up all the pictures of me, and the best picture was taken of Steph at the grad party, wearing a shimmery green top and squished between two handsome men, my boyfriend and hers. It's not fair. It's like the best picture ever. Soon, I am going to stage a sort of cattle call, ring up all the handsome men I know, buy a shimmery green top, and take a whole blasted roll of pictures under the assumption that maybe, just maybe, one will turn out.
Oh and by the way Ryan Steele is an excellent photographer in most cases. Wanted to clarify and un-diss, as it were.
I'm at a dreaded public computer terminal. No phone and no internet for three days has been something of an experience ... Next thing you know I'll be forced to use an outhouse and eat tubers to survive. "I'm the real fucking princess!"
The new house is beautiful and has dauntingly high ceilings. Matt looks short; I look as though I'm not even standing there at all. Sambuca is a blip, just a dark brown period, or comma.
For Ben, names by which I have been known:
Joy
joyous
joy toy
joygasm
Joyce (by people who don't know any better)
Joy to the World (ditto)
Joe (during my "I wanna be a real boy!" phase in grade 5)
shigoily
stumpy
Joosy (as in, "Little baby Joosy Joysy, do you want to sit upon the potty?" from my early 'training' days)
Ms. Waller
Number One Daughter
Rich and Famous Author Daughter
Hey, Waller
Hey, you
The Five-Year Bitch (my own invention, somewhat recent)
Joy-tron (by Jess)
I came all the way up to UVic to get a union egg muffin with no ham and, at 10:30, they were all sold out. Story of my life.
Saw Norm and Kelly and a bevy of other subrats, which was nice. Schoolin goes on. I have just printed off two copies of the Jet application.