Sitting at home wondereding where everyone is drinking

Flickr launched a new feature this week, something they call Collections. It’s a way to create sub-sets, (folders within sets). This means that I could, for example, create a collection called Local Events and fill it with sets like Avery’s Video Game Party, Ikea Adventures, and Flashmob Croquet. It’s likely going to be a long and tedious process for me to switch everything over to the new system, (I have an inhuman amount of photos), but I expect it to be worth the effort. Now if only they would announce, like Livejournal, that permanent accounts will be available for sale soon.

I watched new parents on the Skytrain today, smiling, as all three were young, attractive and happy. Suddenly, a brass thought ship-wrecked whole in my mind – “My father was never that young.” It surprised me, but it feels true. He sprang into the world fully formed at age 35 and only got older from there. I remember him smiling, but even before he went mad, he always looked tired.

Imagining my mother young is easy. I am almost the same age she was when she had me. I thought of standing at the bus-stop, hands on my belly, feeling a hard curve there, cradling The Word inside me, and I knew that she felt happy where I would feel trapped, as if my feet had been pierced through with tent-pegs. She has never been hungry the way I am, her aspirations have always pointed in a different direction, but still I can see her in my mind, thin, almost conventionally pretty, and tenaciously practicing the same six chords on the guitar until her fingers bled, until she grew callous, then bled again. The first day I kicked in her belly must have been a small personal miracle, like branches swaying Yes after you’ve asked the sky a question.

It’s my brother Cale’s 17th birthday today. She named him after J.J. Cale but got the date wrong on the birth certificate and they made her fill it out again. We are not the most cohesive family, but biology links us together irrevocably. He is stuck with us, carries us on every official document he’ll ever have to take the time to fill out and carry. See, I gave him his middle names – he’s Cale St. Patrick Gibson – and wear green every year in atonement.

up too late at night, putting up the last drivefest photos


you have to be kidding
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I’ve created a Flickr Pool, Drivefest, to collect all the photos of the Commercial Drive Car Free Day. Add yours and tell yours and pass it on!

I wanted a water sprinkler to run through today. I wanted to run water through the ink of my hair and to desperately feel like laughing. It’s hard to explain. I wanted to turn to someone and share a conspiratorial glance, rife with a desire to smile a thousand times. I miss the anonymous letters. They were the closest thing I had to anyone calling to see if I was okay, now that no-one cares if I dream about them anymore. (I haven’t received any since May). Precious and rarest of things, they remain mine and only mine.

This lovely Levi ad has been posted before, but now there’s a sweet parody by a UK tropical drink company called Lilt.

I suspect the game became tired. Instead of posting my thoughts here, my lovely impressions, I kept them close to me, wrapped in my writing book and tied with ribbon like I was an old-fashioned child. How so, then, a reward? Reine read them today in the park before we got up to play frisbee with Will. I read one aloud this evening to dear friends who were driving me home from morris dancing. They’re beginning to slide into the consciousness of the people around me. I read them like rosary beads, asking who’s trying to make me smile, like perhaps I’ll be allowed to slip stories into conversation again some day. Ravenous angels dancing on pins, that’s me. A tiny figure, sitting at the feet of who I used to be, looking up and disbelieving. If I am a city, these letters have been tagging my walls.

UBC engineering students have built a vehicle so efficient that it achieves 3,145 miles per US gallon (0.074 litres/100 km)

“I’ve been a long time coming, and I’ll be a long time gone” ani difranco

I forgot to being Imogyne‘s birthday present with me to work today, despite that I remembered it yesterday. I’m hoping she’ll like it.

I win at Derek’s brain.

Yesterday Terri visited and brought black chocolate gelati. Andrew called and bought me concert tickets that I will later have to pay for. TV On the Radio, Secret Machines, Frog Eyes with a member of Wolf Parade. (video). On the phone was my mother, we tried so hard to keep talking. At the hospital, I left hungry letters to myself on Devon‘s laptop while he tried to sleep. Darling man, if I’m lucky, he won’t find it until I’m gone.

It was exactly this time last year that I decided to go to Toronto.

2005-04-27 00:23
Once upon a time, there

were fairytales
princes and
strange iron shoes
what meant honour
Once upon a time, there
were childhoods
we believed
in gold and
thought being good
was winning

Tell me a story, they said
explain to us why we crave
towers
why we crave pastel dresses and
happy endings

Tell me what matters
when everything is beautiful

I’ve been out of charactor today, but would like to mark for the record that I blame the eye-liner


City Girl
Originally uploaded by cabbit.

St Peters wolf is hunting me, licking at my traces on other peoples skin. My nails ask for defenses back please, they ask for water to drain from my eyes somewhere not in public. I saw today that someone’s referred to me as an ex, and when night falls, that’s what it feels like, though I know it only as a convenient term that explains really nothing of what happened or what might have been. He kissed me, you know, when he shouldn’t have. I understand deeply, like standing under trees, that there’s been a fundamental shift, that I forced myself to remember that I am a star collapsing. In waking to myself, I had to be alone of this one, this gold skein mannerism. Otherwise, when my heart was beating, it would be a violence, a darkening room without a coloured door.

  • stencil art billboards
  • the wooster collective

    Amusing to me, I realize as I write this that I’m wearing a stolen ring. Usually a sign of solidarity, this time it means a freedom in vocabulary, it means someone I feel quick enough to keep up with. These round celtic knots tied one into the next, this band, this loop, I’m twisting it around my finger. Metal there feels right, the flesh feels righted, but the implications, the loose ties of acquaintance versus friendship, they nag at me with a peculiar fascination. In my mind, there’s something waking. A fierce creature with steady cravings, I can’t see it, though I feel it growing restless. What it is I’m uncertain, something to do with words, with expression.

  • pictures of wall
  • intricate x-wing t-shirt

    Yesterday was long, a golden musical chairs of people in and out. It began merely an hour after returning from Beth’s delightful house-warming. Navi was over in the morning, and Ryan, with James visiting in the afternoon. We went to dinner with my mother, Vicki, and her father, John, at Wild Ginger. My first time meeting my granda as an adult. It was, shall we say, illuminating. He reminded me that I’m a quarter gypsy, which is something I had almost forgotten, but that we are related to the highest placed mafia family in Canada. This is especially delightful considering that I’ve finally discovered what it is he does. It was rather surprising. I knew that he used to be a salesman of sorts but I was entirely unaware that currently my granda is a bootlegging gigolo. I swear, my family only gets better. The best part? He’s a British Citizen, has been for thirty+ years. A landed immigrant back in the day when bombs still fell in first world countries. The way the laws are, that means that so am I. When I get my passport, depending on how soon I reapply, then it just might not be Canadian. (So anyone I asked to marry for citizenship, if you’re still interested, you’re going to have to supply another interesting country or two).