Fun with shards of glass

I set a glass down on the drying rack in the dish room at work last night, somewhere I thought it would stay. It decided that it didn't want to stay there and I went to catch it before it hit the floor. I did catch it before it hit the floor, but after it had shattered against the side of the counter.

I got a pretty good gash on my ring finger on my right hand. Lots of blood. Cleaned it up and bandaged it and decided that it probably would be okay. When I changed the bandage this morning, I changed my mind on that and went to the ER after work. It wasn't too bad. It took about two hours for me to be seen. About what I'd expected, given that I had a pretty nasty wound but that my finger was still in tact and that it had stopped bleeding.

They decided against stitching it up, given that it had happened last night and given the location and shape of it (sort of a U-shape around the side of my finger), but they did give me a tetanus shot and bandaged it up pretty good for me before sending me on my way...after, of course, I recovered from my near faint after making the mistake of watching the nurse dressing the wound.

I so was not cut out to be a doctor.

Things that make you go 'hmm'

When I read my horoscope last week, I didn't really think much of it. I'm kind of happy that I went back to read it, because after reading this week's, I felt like last week's was important...

The mayor of Las Vegas has suggested a novel idea for discouraging graffiti on his city's highway walls. Oscar Goodman envisions televised spectacles in which the vandals' thumbs are cut off. His proposed punishment goes too far for my tastes, but I'm wondering if you might approve of it. Lately you've been having bouts of overreaction, entertaining extreme fantasies in response to circumstances that don't necessarily warrant them. I'm not saying your intense emotions are completely unjustified, Cancerian, nor do I recommend that you repress them. I'm simply asking you to let some time pass before you take action on your feelings.

I was in such a shitty, depressed mood yesterday that I tried not to go to work but couldn't find anyone to cover my shift. I decided that when I got home, I would watch Les Invasions Barbares, a movie that almost always makes me cry, sometimes by the end of the opening credits. Of course, it didn't work last night. But it gave me the nudge I needed, I think. On the whole, it's a film about finding peace. I've not yet found that, but I think I'm out of the rut that I've been in for the past week. We'll see how it goes.

Why must we be entrapped by our past?

Why is it that I can understand why the boy says that he needs a bit more space and yet my mind refuses to let him have it?

We had our first real relationship talk over the weekend. It was a very good talk, I think. For as much as I have on my mind about various things that I've mentioned recently, he has a lot on his mind too. He needs to figure out whether he's staying in his job and, if not, what he's doing. We'd fallen into a very comfortable pattern that meant that we were spending virtually every night together, which meant that although we were spending a lot of time together, we were both ignoring or procrastinating putting effort into other things that really ought to have been more focused upon.

He needs space to figure things out. I need space to figure things out. All this means is that we need to spend a little less time together. This isn't a bad thing. He has become almost my entire social life because of the hours that I've been working. That's not good.

We had an impromptu period of more space when he was sick for a few days last week and I didn't see him. It really, really bothered me. More than it ought to have. A lot more than it ought to have. I started thinking all sorts of irrational things. Like he's not really sick; he hates me; he never wants to see me. I figured I'd done something but couldn't come up with anything. We weren't talking very much while he was sick (not surprisingly--he was sick after all) and my mind kept leaping to the conclusion that our relationship was over.

For no reason.

Until it finally occurred to me where these ridiculous insecurities were coming from. Those of you who know me well will remember the relationship I was in that ended almost four years ago. When the guy I was seeing just walked away to start seeing someone new after I had bent over backwards to try to make things work.

There's absolutely no reason to think that the current boy might be about to do this. None. He's not one to play games, as far as I can tell. He's not going to tell me that he needs space and then walk away. The need for space doesn't even have anything to do with us. It's because he needs his own time to focus on what he's doing with his life. Which is the same reason that I need space.

Granted, the end result of all this thinking might impact our relationship. I can't speak for him, but I know that my thinking leads towards my leaving Portland sooner rather than later. That's one of the possible outcomes of his thinking too. If things are meant to work out longer term, maybe our thinking will coincide on this. Or not. There are so many variables and decisions between now and the end result that it's hardly worth worrying about, right? Which isn't to say that it wouldn't be at the back of my mind even absent all this other fretting. That would only be normal. It's all this other fretting that's bothering me.

This boy is not that boy. Why does that emotional scar have to manifest itself now? Why am I able to fully agree to both of us needing space to work our shit out and yet simultaneously think that this is the end of the relationship? We both need to figure our shit out if we're to move forward in the relationship, because we have to figure our shit out individually to move on with out individual lives. And we can't move on with our joint life without being able to move on with our individual lives.

The question of the L word came up in our talk over the weekend and neither of us was quite ready to say it--and that's okay. I think we both agree that it's not something to be taken lightly or something to be thrown around carelessly. Even if I'm not quite ready to say that I love him, I definitely lurv him (apply your own interpretation as to what 'lurv' is versus 'love') a lot. I've come to care for him very deeply over the past three months and want to do whatever I can for him. If he needs more space, I want to give him more space.

Ultimately, it comes down to trust. Why is it that something that happened four years ago is not letting me simply adjust to this new situation? Why won't my mind let me trust him? Especially when I fully agree with the fact that we both need more personal time? I have no logical reason to feel this way. I realise that the heart doesn't work in logic but I hate feeling entrapped by something that happened to me in the past. Yes, that relationship that ended was a big one, one in which I had invested much more time. But, on the other hand, I was younger, too. Not that I'm so old now, but that was my first really long term relationship and it was a relationship I never would have let go on so long were I to find myself in it today. For as much as I was hurt by the way that it ended, I made my fair share of mistakes while I was in it, I'm sure.

It's almost three in the morning and I haven't been able to sleep because this has been hammering away at my head. And before this, it was everything else that I've had on my mind recently, mostly the 'what the fuck am I doing with my life?' bit.

I think I've just about hit rock bottom in my period of angst/depression. The past week or so has been pretty shitty emotionally for me. Sunday after I got home from work, most of the time I was at work yesterday and for the past couple of hours now I've felt about ready to cry. But I haven't been able to let go. I think I've reached the point where the emotional catharsis would be really good for me.

Hopefully I'll get that soon.

*happy banana dance*

I don't think I had mentioned that my tax refunds were a lot larger than I expected them to be. So, I finally went and did it. After only four-and-a-half years of lusting, I've finally gone and bought myself an iPod! 30gb video iPod. Engraved on the back with something only I would find amusing: 'Ceci n'est pas un iPod'. I forgot to put a period at the end, which is going to bother me, but I'll survive. I hate that they've dropped FireWire support in favour of USB only since my computer only has USB 1.1 which means that it's going to take FOREVER to do this first update. Hopefully it'll be done by the time I leave for work later, though.

Wee!

Maybe someday...

...my stupid cat will learn that when she drinks from the faucet she gets water up her nose and then hacks and coughs for ten minutes afterwards.

The weather...

...is fucked. A few days ago it was +7c. Right now it's -7c. I think mother nature is going through menopause.

As for the Daily Show, since Cat asked about it, well, it was fun. A lot of waiting around. Stood outside from 3.30-5. Then sat around inside for close to an hour before they let us in the studio. Then sat around some more (maybe about half an hour) until the warm-up comedian guy came out and blathered on for about 20-30 minutes. He was funny, to be fair. The taping itself took as long as watching the show since they played a song between each segment while they got ready for the next one. It was cool to be there, but it involved so much waiting around and I was so over-tired from not having slept enough that I found it a bit underwhelming.

New York City Boy

This was the original plan: drive down to Connecticut on Sunday, take the train into the City Sunday night in order to have all day Monday before having to get into line for The Daily Show, after the show and dinner take the train back to Connecticut and leave early Tuesday morning to get back here before I had to be at work Tuesday afternoon.

That more or less happened. Except for the driving down part. For those of you not paying attention to the news or what's been going on outside your windows, Sunday was when we got that big huge snow storm, which, actually, wasn't really that bad here in Maine. Still, it was nothing to be driven in. So we didn't drive down, we took the train instead.

The train from Portland to Boston was interesting, since it was the only way to get out of the city that day. There were kids going back to school after their weekend at home, everyone from Portland going to the Celtics game that night, and everyone else who just needed to get out of the city. An interesting mix, you might imagine.

Exemplary of this mix were the two guys who, when asked if they minded where they were sitting, because there was a group of four who wanted to be able to sit together, responded, 'Yup. Wanna be close to the beer and close to the bathroom.' (You'll have to apply what you imagine the Maine accent to be yourself.) They did move in the end though.

I mostly escaped by listening to music and trying to read the paper but the woman in front of us just didn't have an indoor voice that worked so it was difficult to drown out her exclamations of 'It looks like a blizzard out there!' and her various complaints to her husband that the headphone splitter that they had bought for their laptop sucked.

There was nothing open in Boston of course because of the storm and the train ride to New York was relatively uneventful in comparison to all of the colourful characters on the Portland-to-Boston train. The weird thing about it was the fact that both trains were essentially on time. Amtrak is never on time. Ever. Perfect weather? 30 minutes late. Blizzard? 5 minutes late.

What was most amusing about New York was the fact that people just weren't quite sure to do with all this snow. The City got over 2 feet. The boy's friend that we stayed with pointed out that every time there's a big storm, they show people on the news buying shovels. As if they didn't already own one. What about all the times there've been big storms before? Apparently they just abandon the shovels in snow banks or something. 'It'll never snow again! I don't need this!' Sure enough, we did see a few shovels abandoned on the sidewalks of New York as we walked around.

It was Monday. Nothing exciting was open. We walked around and shopped instead. We had to be in line for the Daily Show mid-afternoon so we couldn't really get too ambitious. I was over-tired since I opened on Sunday and then didn't manage to nap on the train, so I was a bit of a zombie all day. Dinner after the show was yummy and I got to see a friend from university whom I haven't seen since she graduated the year before me.

Tuesday, as I predicted, was the longest day ever. I managed to sleep a little bit on the drive back to Maine but was still tired when I got to work just on time at 2. It was decently busy but I figured that it would quiet down for the last hour, it being Valentine's Day and all. And it sort of did until we got a rush for the last half hour and then hadn't been able to lock the doors and people just kept coming in. It actually wasn't so bad and we were able to get people out and lock up by quarter past 8 and then to get out of there by 9.30. It was just that neither I nor the person I was closing with particularly wanted to be there any longer than absolutely necessary.

In the end, it was a good trip. Fun but far too short. Incidentally, it wasn't the shortest trip I've ever taken to New York. In fact, three of the now five times that I've been to New York have been day trips from Massachusetts. Those ones were way, way too short. They were also when I was a kid and found the City to be very overwhelming. Now, I feel like I have a better handle on the City and don't find it so overwhelming...except for Times Square. That still freaks me out a bit.

Relatively painless

Yay! I filled my US taxes! I should have lots of money soon, with which I will purchase new glasses!

I'm still waiting for my paperwork from Canada so I can file those taxes too.... Oh, and did I rant about my bank refusing to cash my refund cheque from my Canadian federal taxes from last year because it's dated more than six months ago--even though I just got it now? My bank are a bunch of poopy-heads, but the nice people at Revenue Canada said that if I just write them a letter, they'll mail me out a new cheque.

I (heart) Canada.

What was not at all relatively painless was the migraine that I developed shortly after getting to work yesterday and that did not subside until about an hour after work. And I had no chance to leave to get anything for it because we were steadily busy thanks to the Sigur Rós concert across the street last night. At least the Sigur Rós fans were nice and articulate and tipped well—and had the common decency not to use us merely for our washroom. Unlike the concert last week that populated downtown with little gothlings who did nothing but buy hot chocolate and not tip and make a mess in the washroom.

Early-mid twenties angst?

I thought angst was over after you weren't a teenager anymore....

I think the epitome of the current angst is the last verse of the first song below. I keep thinking about grad school. I like history. A lot. But I keep questioning whether or not I'll be happy doing that. It's a huge commitment, this academic life. A decade, give or take, of grad school. Then another decade, give or take, before tenure—never mind the issue of trying to get a job somewhere that I'd actually want to live.

And on top of all that, I worry about the state of the world far too much to lock myself away in an ivory tower. Part of me says that I could still very much be involved in trying to change the world as an academic—that's the same part of me that reminds me that I've never really done much to help to change the world in any active sense. But there's another part of me that thinks I really ought to be try to be rather more active in helping to change the world. But the question is in what capacity? And how? Law? Politics? Social services? Ministry?!

(Yes, I just wrote that. Big secret: once upon a time, before I lost my faith in the Catholic church, I thought I maybe wanted to be a priest. Dating a minister has brought back certain of those feelings. I've been thinking a lot, in any case, about starting maybe to go to church again. This is something that I've been thinking about on and off for about a year, ever since my great-grandfather died last March. It was always clear that the Catholic church wouldn't cut it for me and I thought a lot about the Anglican church—what can I say, I'm a ceremony-whore—but it all remains very muddled.)

Suffice it to say, I've a lot on my mind right now. Other than that, things are fantastic. I'll be in Connecticut a week from right now, eagerly awaiting my day in NYC with the boy and his friends to see the DAILY SHOW next Monday!!!

And now, a selection of lyrics from Avenue Q.

What do you do with a B.A. in English?

What do you do with a B.A. in English,
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree.

I can't pay the bills yet,
'Cause I have no skills yet,
The world is a big scary place.

But somehow I can't shake,
The feeling I might make,
A difference,
To the human race.

I wish I could go back to college

KATE MONSTER:
I wish I could go back to college.
Life was so simple back then.

NICKY:
What would I give to go back and live in a dorm with a meal plan again!

PRINCETON:
I wish I could go back to college.
In college you know who you are.
You sit in the quad, and think, "Oh my God!
I am totally gonna go far!"

ALL:
How do I go back to college?
I don't know who I am anymore!

PRINCETON:
I wanna go back to my room and find a message in dry-erase pen on the door!
Ohhh...
I wish I could just drop a class...

NICKY:
Or get into a play...

KATE MONSTER:
Or change my major...

PRINCETON:
Or fuck my T.A.

ALL:
I need an academic advisor to point the way!
We could be...
Sitting in the computer lab,
4 A.M. before the final paper is due,
Cursing the world 'cause I didn't start sooner,
And seeing the rest of the class there, too!

PRINCETON:
I wish I could go back to college!

ALL:
How do I go back to college?!
Ahhhh...

PRINCETON:
I wish I had taken more pictures.

NICKY:
But if I were to go back to college,
Think what a loser I'd be-
I'd walk through the quad,
And think "Oh my God..."

ALL:
"These kids are so much younger than me."

For Now

PRINCETON:
Why does everything have to be so hard?

GARY COLEMAN:
Maybe you'll never find your purpose.

CHRISTMAS EVE:
Lots of people don't.

PRINCETON:
But then- I don't know why I'm even alive!

KATE MONSTER:
Well, who does, really?
Everyone's a little bit unsatisfied.

BRIAN:
Everyone goes 'round a little empty inside.

GARY COLEMAN:
Take a breath,
Look around,

BRIAN:
Swallow your pride,

KATE MONSTER:
For now...

BRIAN, KATE, GARY, CHRISTMAS EVE:
For now...

NICKY:
Nothing lasts,

ROD:
Life goes on,

NICKY:
Full of surprises.

ROD:
You'll be faced with problems of all shapes and sizes.

CHRISTMAS EVE:
You're going to have to make a few compromises...
For now...

TREKKIE MONSTER:
For now...

ALL:
But only for now! (For now)
Only for now! (For now)
Only for now! (For now)
Only for now!

LUCY:
For now we're healthy.

BRIAN:
For now we're employed.

BAD IDEA BEARS:
For now we're happy...

KATE MONSTER:
If not overjoyed.

PRINCETON:
And we'll accept the things we cannot avoid, for now...

GARY COLEMAN:
For now...

TREKKIE MONSTER:
For now...

KATE MONSTER:
For now...

ALL:
But only for now! (For now)
Only for now! (For now)
Only for now! (For now)
Only for now!

Only for now!
(For now there's life!)
Only for now!
(For now there's love!)
Only for now!
(For now there's work!)
For now there's happiness!
But only for now!
(For now discomfort!)
Only for now!
(For now there's friendship!)
Only for now (For now!)
Only for now!

Only for now! (Sex!)
Is only for now! (Your hair!)
Is only for now! (George Bush!)
Is only for now!

Don't stress,
Relax,
Let life roll off your backs
Except for death and paying taxes,
Everything in life is only for now!

NICKY:
Each time you smile...

ALL:
...Only for now

KATE MONSTER:
It'll only last a while.

ALL:
...Only for now

PRINCETON:
Life may be scary...

ALL:
...Only for now
But it's only temporary

Ba-dum ba-dum
Ba-dum ba-dum
Ba dum ba-dum
Ba-da da da da
ba-da da-da da da-da
Ba-dum ba-da, ba-dum ba-da
ohhhh-

PRINCETON:
Everything in life is only for now.

The dangers of the internet

The internet allows any idiot teenager in any wood-panneled basement in America with access to a digital movie camera to film himself and his two friends dancing around in g-strings, performing a choreographed act to the Village People's 'YMCA'.

He and his two *cough cough* 'not gay' *cough cough* friends.

What I want to know is how these kids will explain this to their parents if they somehow find it. And what they'll think when years down the road, they rediscover this little nugget of teenage stupidity.

I also want to know how long it is before one of them gets offered a Bel-Ami contract.

Podcast Obsession

And I don't even have an iPod!

I currently have 9.4 hours of unlistened-to podcasts sitting in iTunes right now. And I keep adding more and more! It's madness, I tell you!

I think that the whole idea of podcasting is really great, especially because it means that I can listen to things that I would normally want to listen to whenever I have time to actually listen to them. I wish other things would have podcasts, like Prairie Home Companion, even though there is a streaming archive online. That's just laziness, I guess. It's not really that much more difficult to go to the Prairie Home Companion website and listen to the archived show.

Admittedly, I haven't really ventured out into the underbelly of podcasting. All of the podcasts that I'm subscribed to are from traditional media outlets (albeit ones like the BBC and NPR and CBC). I've sampled a few independent podcasts but the ones that I've tried have just been general crap. I don't have time for that. I figure if there's something that I need to hear, it will float my way through cyberspace and I'll subscribe to it. I'm not going to go looking for it.

Ready for the rundown?

PBS's American Experience podcast, which basically gives little teasers for upcoming shows but are full enough to be self-contained.

Canadian Voices. I've just subscribed to this one, which only just started and is to be a 15-part series of programmes featuring such Canadians as Jane Jacobs, David Suzuki, Roméo Dallaire, etc. The first episode is with Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for Hiv/Aids in Africa and former Canadian Ambassador to the UN, speaking on the Hiv/Aids pandemic in Africa.

CBC Radio 3's podcast. Another I've only just subscribed to. A new music programme.

Discovery Channel Podcasts. These ones are about half-an-hour and I hope that they don't all use the same narrator as the first one I listened to because if they do then I'll get annoyed really quickly. Pop science stuff basically.

In Our Time from BBC Radio 4. It's an idea talk show, basically. Always very well-qualified guests and always very interesting topics. I listened to a programme on relativism the other day and have two in queue--one on 17th century print culture and another on the Abbasid Caliphs.

La Première à la carte. This from Radio-Canada. It's essentially like NPR's Story of the Day, which I'm also subscribed to, but from Radio-Canada and featuring a half-hour of stories instead of just one story.

Nova and Nova scienceNOW. I'm not really clear what the exact difference between these two is other than the fact that scienceNOW seems to be much more infrequent than Nova. scienceNOW bills itself as 'Science Candy' whereas Nova is 'Short audio stories from the world of science.'

NPR's All Songs Considered. NPR's new music podcast.

NPR's Story of the day. Self-explanitory, I hope.

On the Media. Another NPR podcast. I don't think this show gets airtime on MPBN. It's produced out of New York and is a weekly hour-long show about, not surprisingly, the media.

Smart City. Yet another NPR podcast. I know this one isn't on MPBN. It's another I've only just subscribed to. It's basically an urban affairs/development/life/living/etc show. Listened to one episode so far and was quite pleased.

Finally, but certainly not least, The Onion Radio News. Brief audio stories from the Onion--every day! It rocks!