Monthly Archives: November 2004

Assorted Daily Life

So yeah.

Got my hair bleached blonde. I’ve always want­ed very pale blonde hair, but mid­tone is about as far as it goes.

Trolley, Aaron, and wheaties got me Half-Life 2 for my birth­day. I did­n’t have a chance to real­ly play it until this week­end, but I decid­ed to play through Half-Life: Source first, because it was four years five years since I last fin­ished it, and going through the game again would help me appre­ci­ate all the lit­tle details being put into the sequel. The odd thing is that I remem­ber tak­ing weeks to play it through, where­as I start­ed play­ing HL:S Friday, played a bit last night, and am almost done now. It’s nice to be able to sit and play through a game, tak­ing my time, not hav­ing to wor­ry about class­es, or assign­ments, or tests, etc. This makes me real­ize that I haven’t real­ly got­ten into a game like this since I fin­ished uni­ver­si­ty.

Finally get to go for some pho with Loo today. We haven’t been almost two weeks.

Aaron bought me a quadruple/quadruple from Timmies yes­ter­day, and it was good. I’ve been try­ing to cut down on sug­ar and creme for years now, so four of each being so sati­at­ing (almost can­dy-like) is very scary.

I took my first puff from a cig­a­rette yes­ter­day. It was a Matinee Extra Mild, and it was­n’t pleas­ant. I was stoned, and the weed tast­ed way bet­ter.

The Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex tracks that Number18 sent me are amaz­ing. She rules.

Been busy as fuck.

That’s all. I’m going back to sleep.

Window Seat Winner

Yesterday I was tak­ing the bus home, sit­ting in an aisle seat next to some­one (the part of the bus where there are four pairs of seats, two pairs fac­ing for­ward on each side of the aisle). There was a girl in the seats in front of me, with her bag next to her, pre­vent­ing some­one from sit­ting there, and two peo­ple sit­ting in the seats across the aisle from her. Eventually, she made like she was going to get off at the next stop, and put her bag on her lap. The guy in the aisle seat across from her (at an angle to me) saw, and looked rapa­cious­ly at the soon-to-be-vacant win­dow seat. Then he looked back at me, and saw me eying the seat as well, and going through the motions of a Tarantino joke from Desperado (“Dick, glass. Dick, glass. Dick, glass.”), except with me and the emp­ty seat. As soon as he real­izes that he might lose the cov­et­ed win­dow seat to me, he gets up and sits in the recent­ly vacat­ed space next to the girl to reserve the spot, before she even gets up to leave. Eventually, the next stop comes along, and she does­n’t get off. Instead, the per­son who was sit­ting in the win­dow seat next to him before he moved gets up and leaves. The guy looks over to the new­ly vacat­ed win­dow spot, and, too embar­rassed to move back, just stays next to the girl, stew­ing in the con­se­quences of his error.

I could feel his scalp start­ing to itch, the way a sud­den break of sweat starts to tin­gle the pores along the back.

And then I walked over to the win­dow seat, and slumped down com­fort­ably. Learning to nev­er make assump­tions and nev­er be too anx­ious was easy. It was learn­ing to live that by those rules that was the hard part.

I also touched some guys leg with my fin­gers lat­er on, because he rude­ly shoved his knees into my legs while mak­ing his way to a stand­ing spot. Nothing makes a man jump like chal­leng­ing his het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty.

Music Saves The Day

I was rid­ing the bus the oth­er day, and a woman got on and sat in a per­pen­dic­u­lar seat in front of me. She wore plain mary-janes, thick wool stock­ings, a con­ser­v­a­tive plaid skirt, and had her hair in a slight­ly orna­ment­ed pony-tail. I assume that she was in her late twen­ties, but her demeanour was almost child-like. She sat for a while, star­ing at noth­ing, car­ry­ing a per­pet­u­al­ly inno­cent, apolo­getic expres­sion on her face, as if she had a tir­ing day and was pen­i­tent to those around her for being in such an exhaust­ed state.

Sticking out of her bag was a sim­ple, white, let­ter-sized book­let with the head­ing “DEMOCRACY IN ACTION PROGRAM”, and I thought it was odd that a par­lia­men­tary event being held in the cap­i­tal of Canada would use the American spelling of the word “pro­gramme”.

Soon, she pulled out a set of plas­tic, bulky Sony head­phones (the ones with the over­sized foam that actu­al­ly come with a music device), and searched her bag for the tape play­er attached at the end of the cord. Now, I admit that I’m already gen­er­al­ly attract­ed to old­er, home­ly look­ing women, but it was the fact that she had such a pure look of sim­ple bliss on her face when she put on the head­phones, as if she was wait­ing all day to lis­ten to her music, that I found most attrac­tive.

The Half-Life 2 Hype

I won­der if any­one under­stands how much the release of HL 2 means to me. I won­der if any­one can under­stand how emo­tion­al I get just see­ing the con­cept art. The first Half-Life defined more than a year of my life, the way decades have defined phas­es for pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Half-Life was my favourite game of all time, not even sec­ond to Chrono Trigger. It was an expe­ri­ence, a jour­ney, not just a game, and the sequel is being released tomor­row.

I for­mat­ted my machine yes­ter­day (some­thing I haven’t done in over a year, even though I used to every quar­ter before the release of XP), to clean up my sys­tem in prepa­ra­tion. I’m hop­ing I’ll be able to run it on a decent graph­ics set­ting; my video card is a lit­tle dat­ed now, but it’s still a DirectX 9 gen­er­a­tion ATI Radeon.

I can’t wait. The entire idea that some­thing I’ve been wait­ing more than four years for will be released tomor­row has­n’t quite set in my head yet.