Who uses paper anymore?

I've realized that packaging makes me regress approximately 2000 years. I feel like a primate when I am sitting at my desk, working on my Master's courses, and then have to face opening a new cd case. When was the last time you had to get the cellophane off a new cd case? For me it's been a long time. I'm sitting there clawing at it stupidly, biting into the sides, like a mongoose trying to get at the inside of an egg. I know there's something good in there, but I have no idea how to get at it. I'm hitting it on the wall, scratching it, yelling at it, and still the thing won't open. Computers may be a great revolution in technology, but it makes me stupid at packages.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHSSSTTRRESSSSS

So I walked into my Master's supervisor's office the other day and asked him how his weekend was. He said, "it was good, until I read your paper." Ouch.

It's one thing to be hard on me, and critique me because he has high expectations of me, which is a good thing, but now I'm ruining people's weekends every time I hand in a haphazard paper. I'm feeling a little pressure up in here. I'm panicky, i'm breathing weird, i'm exhausted--I think McGill is trying to kill me.

Leah McLaren, in last weekend's Globe and Mail, wrote an article about stress--she does yoga, she meditates, she drinks wine and rants with her friends, she goes for long walks and runs, and she is so busy trying to relax that she forgets to relax. According to her article, 55% of Canadians feel 'extreme stress' about various things in their lives--the highest stat in the world. We are apparently being coined, annoyingly, the 'Stressettes.' I prefer the "Age of Anxiety" or "Generation Why?" but I guess McLaren does write chicklit, so she can pick her own annoying term.

Anyway, after this little experience with my professor, I told myself it was okay, it was for the best, and that I can handle it. I went for a jog, did some meditation, listened to some music, and then called poor unsuspecting Cheyne and burst into tears. The poor guy had no idea what to say, and in the state I was in, he could do nothing but make it all worse. "So you wrote a shitty essay. Who cares?" he tried. All I could say was, "...you think I wrote a shitty essay?"

I got myself the hell off the phone for a little Cristina and Alison love and called him back when I could stop acting like such a girl. I feel better about the whole thing now if just because I have Alison, Cristina, and Cheyne doing their very earnest best to make me feel better. And they do. Leah McLaren can keep her stressettes. I'm keeping my own anxious, wonderful, friends, who don't say stuff like 'stressettes.'

yeah. And i drove! In montreal!

I just need to take this moment to gush about how awesome my roomates are. We sit around all day, pantsless, drinking wine and reading poetry to each other. When we get bored of that, we make pillows out of Che tshirts or drive to Cristina's cottage, to drink more wine and read more poetry. Sometimes we even support each other, with pillows, massages, Wayne's World and wine.

We'll start with the lineup of pillows.

healthy body happy heart power brain YAAAA!

I have just returned from my first experience at the Body and Brain club, a centre for martial arts, yoga, and dance. Or, as Cristina says, Maryogarts. ...ance.

In this class, a smiling Manu led us in a 'vibration exercise' in which we bounced on our feet for FIFTEEN MINUTES. I felt like my whole body was having a party all together and hanging out at last, saying to ...uh, myself, we should really do this more often!

At the end of the class, we slapped our stomachs together and then shouted out "HEALTHY BODY HAPPY HEART POWER BRAIN YAAAAA!" and then jumped up in the air.

It was pretty hilarious, and a very good time. It may have been a bit too much with the feelings, however. I might just stick to boring old power yoga.

In other news, Cristina pointed out that I managed to name my new plant after postmodernism completely by accident. Poor little Pomona doesn't know what she's in for.

Meet my new best friend, Pomona (the Euphorbia Somona). I think it's about time i figured out if I could actually take care of a living thing.

She's cool because she's cute, but not trying to show you up with her big ol' flowers, and if you look closer, she's got thorns. She's got spunk, and I can relate.

IFFP

More from the annals of that terrifying cyber space, the Facebook:

There is a group on the Facebook called "if this group reaches 100 000 my girlfriend will have a threesome."

Um. Does anyone else see a problem here? There are over 300 000 people in the group, and now the creator, some dude called Brody, is putting up pictures of potential candidates for threesome-hood that the members of the group can vote for. Does said girlfriend have any say in all this?

Maybe she set herself up by agreeing to challenge the powerful world of the interscape. Maybe she is prostituting herself, facebook-style. I hope she gets paid when the videotape goes on the web. Or, at least, gets her own reality TV show: The Simple Life: Facebooking!

'Facebooking': the most sinister intercommunication device since 'texting'

So there has been lots of buzz about the new settings of this psycho website, The Facebook. There's now this thing called a 'news feed' that tells everyone who logs in which parties people are invited to, whose wall they wrote on, and the exact moment at which their relationship status switched from 'in a relationship' to 'single.' On these particularly momentous incidences, a little broken heart emoticon shows up beside the message.

In the first place, the Facebook is already a website where people can stalk their ex-boyfriends and see pictures of their new girlfriends, who they will then show to their friends to be mercilessly judged. It's also a great place for 'facebooking,' the newest trend in flirting since 'texting' came along. I thought at first it was kind of silly for people to be getting upset about this stuff since everyone seems to want to be all up in everyone else's business anyway.

Then, however, i logged in to a message from the facebook: "five of your friends are attending this party, hosted by your friend. If you would like an invite, ask her." Hey, facebook, stop being such a jerk. I don't care that I wasn't invited to a party all my other friends were invited to. I'm not going to ASK for an invite. Then i proceeded to obsess about it and gossip about it with my roomate for a grand total of 2 minutes before i started to realize I had regressed back into grade 9.

Though the facebook is great for things like looking up friends whose contact info you lost, posting the website to your new blog (ahem) and looking really cool because you have 25 photo albums to share, I'm thinking i may need to leave this little high-school instrument of pain in the archives of my personal cyberspace and un-bookmark it.

The question remains: can I tear myself away from the high-school antics of 'facebooking'? Maybe i'll just go check it out now before I start my work...

the fantastic world of Mount Royal

Welcome to my blog. My friends tell me they find my life endlessly fascinating, and want to read about it when they can't hear me talk incessantly. Thus, the inception of this blog. First post: pigeon death. A good way to start, no?

Yesterday, having the rainy and dismal Saturday all to myself, I decided to go out shopping for a few hours. As I was walking along Mount Royal street, I saw a pigeon lying on the ground beside a car, flapping its wings frantically, eyes wild, trying, without success, to get back on its feet. It was shaking and rolling upside down, absolutely panicked at its state, maybe with a broken leg, maybe sick orhaving flown into something. I stood there astonished, heart thumping, watching the little thing suffer and not knowing what to do about it. I knew all that could be done was to kill it, but being brought up with the sensibilities of a city girl, I had no idea how to do it, nor did I think I would be in the least bit capable of, say, stomping on its head.

Two guys came up next to me and commented on what needed to be done. We stood there for a bit more and then they disappeared. I stood in shock, feeling like I was about to cry, and just about to walk away, when one of the men came back with a plastic bag. "Could you please stay with me while I kill this bird? I can't do it by myself," he said, and I said, "of course." He gathered the terrified pigeon up in the bag and we walked quickly to an alleyway, where he smashed the bag repeatedly against a concrete wall. I stood by, hands at my mouth, trying not to cry. When it was over, he thanked me for being with him while he did it. We sought out a garbage to throw the lost pigeon in, and I thanked him for having the bravery to do something when most people on the street, including me, were willing to walk by and let the pigeon suffer. Then we parted ways, and I walked into the Aldo shoe outlet of all things. I walked right out again, and wandered confusedly, completely unable to keep shopping for that day.

I think most people have an overwhelming fear of death. We'd like to believe that death doesn't happen eveyrday, that it's not a part of all the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the institutions we support. Being vegetarian, for example, is one way to deny to yourself the fact that there is death involved in all aspects of consumption, and not just that of animal consumption itself (not that it is not a good thing to do and support in general). I am grateful to that man on the street for his bravery and ability to do something many people couldn't face, and I am grateful as well that I could be there to support him while he did it.

Poor little pigeon!