Posts in category "Daily Life"

Thoughts On Missing A Play

In post war England, an immi­nent mur­der is announced in the local paper. A mur­der does occur, but not the one expect­ed and it is Miss Marple who comes to the res­cue to solve the mys­ti­fy­ing case.

Two tick­ets, but I’m on the down­swing. It’s the intro­vert­ed end of my cycle and I can’t meet new peo­ple or go out­side with­out feel­ing some kind of anx­i­ety. I used to live two blocks away from the the­atre, pass­ing it many times but nev­er in atten­dance. I always kept an eye out for a play I want­ed to see — Equus, or Hamlet, or Picasso at the Lapin Agile — but noth­ing piqued my inter­est. This time, the oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself, Pearl dou­ble-booked with extra tick­ets, and I could­n’t say no.

I force myself to go.

It’s a lit­tle warm to be wear­ing a blaz­er, but noth­ing else affords me the pock­ets for my Moleskine, pen, lens cloth, and iPod. Waiting at the bus stop, I write.

At this time on a Sunday, I’m usu­al­ly wind­ing down. Taking out the garbage, doing the dish­es, fin­ish­ing off an entry, get­ting things squared away for anoth­er week. Instead, I’m head­ing out. For days I’ve been try­ing to write about how jum­bled I feel. There have been new devel­op­ments, both good and bad, leav­ing me with a mix­ture of excite­ment and dis­ap­point­ment. The most I can say is that it makes sense, how I feel, and I can trace every emo­tion to a cause.

The bus comes. On it, I lis­ten to my music but I can’t get in the right head space. Nothing fits. I’m not feel­ing sad, or hap­py, or jad­ed, or ener­getic. I skip song after song.

Stepping off the bus, my ago­ra­pho­bia begins to choke me.

Continue read­ing “Thoughts On Missing A Play”…

Give Me One More Day

I’ve been bit­ing off more than I can chew.

I used to enjoy my qui­et, lazy, relax­ing nights where I could sit down and write, but chances for cre­ativ­i­ty, expres­sion, socia­bil­i­ty have recent­ly been sprout­ing up every­where. These oppor­tu­ni­ties that don’t come around often, so I force myself to take the ini­tia­tive before they’re gone.

Tomorrow.

A Weekend with Darren

I had Darren over from Toronto for the week­end. We were going to do a movie marathon at the the­atre — three in a day — but the movies all sucked. Disturbia? Georgia Rule? Please. Instead, I bought the first sea­son of Six Feet Under, and we fin­ished the rough­ly 11 hour sea­son over two days. Now I can re-watch it with Bronwen and lend it to Pat. To be hon­est, I’d seen up to the sec­ond sea­son before, but I was too stoned to remem­ber most of it.

Thumbnail: Air-tight tea container

Thumbnail: Chai tea

Darren also gave me a nice tea con­tain­er. It’s rather large, since I buy my tea 50mg at a time, but bet­ter too big than too small. He also got me some chai tea, con­sid­ered a well­ness blend. When I asked him what for, he could­n’t give me a rea­son. I love gifts for no rea­son.

We shared our tat­too ideas, and his was the Chinese char­ac­ter for love on his back. Darren and Bronwen are the some of the few peo­ple I can talk open­ly with about love. We’re such hope­less roman­tics. We tell each oth­er that we’ll nev­er be mar­ried, not to be self-depra­cat­ing, but to be hon­est with our­selves. We have our ideals, and we’ll nev­er set­tle for any­thing less. It’s com­fort­ing to know that we’re not alone in our quixot­ic beliefs.

May Long Weekend '07

Thumbnail: Oktoberfest sausages
Thumbnail: Barbecue ribs
Thumbnail: Silicon brush
Thumbnail: Chicken drumsticks
Thumbnail: Shish kebabs
Thumbnail: Barbecue thermometer
Thumbnail: Fruit flan, blueberry bonanza, key lime pie

While writ­ing this, I real­ized that my RSS sub­scribers will lose most of the entry; more than half of it is in the cap­tions of the pho­tos, which are embed­ded in the link tag. Almost all my pic­tures have cap­tions actu­al­ly. I may try writ­ing a WordPress plu­g­in or mod­i­fy Lightbox JS 2 to dis­play the cap­tions in sub­scrip­tion feeds.

Pat and Jen had ten of us over for the Victoria day week­end. They put the extra leafs in the table and it was twelve in all. Potato casse­role, ribs, drum­sticks, sausages, sal­ad, corn-on-the-cob, and I don’t even remem­ber what was on the oth­er end. It was fun­ny to see how proud Pat was that there was too much food to fit on the 12 per­son table. I can under­stand though; there’s noth­ing more sat­is­fy­ing than being a good host. I pre­fer the host role to the guest role actu­al­ly. It’s when I can be in con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion, and I’m much bet­ter at mak­ing sure peo­ple are tak­ing care of than being tak­en care of myself (I think a sense of impos­ing is what con­tributes to this).

I won my first game of Settlers of Catan. The qui­et ones are the ones who win, they say, so I tried to keep my mouth shut amidst all the joc­u­lar smack-talk. The guys also played Capcom vs. SNK 2. Even though we all come from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, every sin­gle one of us knew how to play. Very telling of how per­va­sive the Street Fighter series is to our gen­er­a­tion.

The guests help clean up with­out ask­ing, they thank you for hav­ing them, and in return, the hosts thank you for com­ing. You can tell a lot about peo­ple, not just from their friends, but their com­pa­ny as well.