Posts in category "Daily Life"

this is my happy face

All i want to write about late­ly is sun­sets and awk­ward hugs and redis­cov­er­ing coconut mac­a­roons and under­wear and sec­ondish chances and grow­ing old and jus­tice and my new aware­ness of food indus­try issues and the smell of out­doors no mat­ter what the sea­son and want­i­ng to see Germany and my new Magic decks and that last date and how hard it is to do Street Fighter IV com­bos and pic­tures like this

golden girl

and not hav­ing to wear a coat any­more and hand­shakes after real­ly close games and peo­ple being nice to me and feel­ing more com­fort­able with barre chords and what Geneviève wears and Breaking Bad and Nick Drake’s life and root beer floats and the sound of a melod­i­ca and pret­ty cats and open­ing boost­ers and the lux­u­ry of say­ing no and how weird it feels to dri­ve some­where in your PJs and intro­duc­ing oth­ers to that aloe drink and the same old mem­o­ries that I still cher­ish and mini-Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and walk­ing base­lines and being sur­round­ed by such good peo­ple and hav­ing a PS3 and the time com­plex­i­ty of sort­ing algo­rithms and won­der­ing if it’s too late to call and how excit­ed Ryan gets when I vis­it and the songs I want to write and my mem­o­ries of America and scent­ed oils from the Body Shop and choco­late beers and the image of a gauzy dress in the sun.

missed connection

(I was going through some old e‑mails when I found this missed con­nec­tion post I wrote years ago. Aside from get­ting in touch with the per­son I was writ­ing to, one per­son replied, “I am not her… but I read this page hop­ing that one day some­one would post some­thing this nice about me after a ran­dom smile exchanged on a street cor­ner. Well Done.” Don’t we all.)

I was walk­ing north on O’Connor around 5pm yes­ter­day, lost in a thought, when I turned the cor­ner and saw you look­ing at me.

You gave me an unin­hib­it­ed smile, the likes of which seemed to con­vey a strange famil­iar­i­ty. Like we had seen each oth­er at an office par­ty but were nev­er for­mal­ly intro­duced, so we knew of each oth­er’s exis­tence but were too shy to be the first one to say any­thing, and rel­e­gat­ed our com­mu­ni­ca­tion to giv­ing each oth­er quick glances when pass­ing each oth­er in the hall.

It made me think of this line that Emilio Estevez says in St. Elmo’s Fire:

There are sev­er­al quin­tes­sen­tial moments in a man’s life: los­ing his vir­gin­i­ty, get­ting mar­ried, becom­ing a father, and hav­ing the right girl smile at you.

Okay, so maybe Joel Schumacher got the entire con­cept of St. Elmo’s fire wrong in the movie, and sure, Andie MacDowell’s role was as chal­leng­ing as putting but­ter on bread, but she was per­fect for it. She had a fresh face with the right amount of charm and mys­tery to be the love inter­est of the guy who played the pop­u­lar jock in The Breakfast Club, and for a moment yes­ter­day, YOU WERE THAT GIRL. If that makes me the crazy, obsessed wait­er-cum-law stu­dent then so be it. At least I was­n’t the wild frat boy with a bas­tard son who could­n’t hold his life togeth­er that Rob Lowe won the Razzie for, right?

You were the girl who defined one of those four quin­tes­sen­tial moments, and it came at the right time, as I had just spent so much time curs­ing Ottawa for hav­ing such incon­sid­er­ate dri­vers and inac­ces­si­ble down­town park­ing. I was the guy you smiled at who prob­a­bly lives a lit­tle too vic­ar­i­ous­ly through 80s com­ing-of-age movies cause I was nev­er cool enough to have any “real” prob­lems, and your smile stopped me in my tracks. By the time I gained the clar­i­ty to turn around, all I could see was you walk­ing away, in a long black coat, black hat, with red hair.

All I need now is to lose my vir­gin­i­ty, get mar­ried, and become a father. Maybe you could help me with those too.

hope springs eternal

I awoke after five min­utes — or five sec­onds — to a changed world. For a moment, I was free of feeling…love, hate, jeal­ousy. And it all felt like hap­pi­ness.

—Maurice Bendrix, The End of the Affair

a fresh start

A fog hangs low in the streets, illu­mi­nat­ed by the indi­rect rays of an unrisen sun, leav­ing every­thing was awash in grey instead of white.

The sea­sons are chang­ing. Winter is offi­cial­ly over. It nev­er recov­ers from a day like this, when the inevitabil­i­ty of spring can be felt on your skin, as tan­gi­ble as any snowflake or rain­drop. This is when I can look for­ward to sleep­ing with the win­dows open again, a rit­u­al made only sweet­er by it’s ephemer­al­i­ty.

And with that moist smell heavy in the air, I for­get all else.

booster draft

Today, I got to intro­duce some very good friends to each oth­er. Everyone got along famous­ly, although it could­n’t have gone any oth­er way with these guys.

It was the first boost­er draft for three of us. I was mas­sa­cred in every game, and did­n’t have any less fun los­ing to such great sports.

Magic: The Gathering booster draft

Two Innistrad and two Dark Ascension. Oh what glit­ter­ing gold­en sym­bols lie beneath these wrap­pers.

Unfortunately, noth­ing inter­est­ed me when we were pick­ing out rares1, so I got noth­ing for the deck I’m cur­rent­ly build­ing, and no direc­tion for a sec­ond deck. But as Aaron said, even if you lose, it’s cheap­er than a night of pok­er. Sometimes you lose it on the riv­er, some­times you draw 13 con­sec­u­tive lands, and some­times you OH GOD WHY ARE MY CREATURES DEAD ARGHGHHGHGH LETS PLAY AGAIN.

  1. And there was­n’t a sin­gle green rare — exact­ly what I was look­ing for — out of 17 rares. I have no idea what the chances are on that, but I know they’re not big. [↩]