eyes are the windows of the soul, I said casually

January 31, 2013 - 3:01am - by admin

and he stood in front of me and held me by my upper arms

came in close so our lips almost touched

even though we'd only just met

looked straight into my eyes and said

'so I'm looking into your soul right now?'

and I shivered

in that good way.

---

coffee shop boy from years back

January 30, 2013 - 8:50pm - by admin

I met you one really really cold winter night. I was out with a friend and we were hiding from the cold while waiting to do something. see a play or a movie or some shit like that.

wait, no. I'm wrong.

we spent a lot of hours at that coffee shop over the course of a few years and that was a different boy and a different time.

this time we were talking about her girlfriend. we were talking about how she didn't know how to 'be' with her girlfriend because she loved her and wanted to be a lesbian but banging a chick just wasn't cutting it for her anymore and she was concerned. confused. sexually and otherwise, I guess. I was facing the coffee shop and I noticed you sitting there and you were looking at something. a book or a camera I think and I couldn't stop staring at you.

not because you were uberhot or really ugly or anything like that. you just looked interesting.



eventually we got up to leave and I mentioned you to my friend and she dared me to blow you a kiss through the window as we walked by which terrified me so of course I did it.

I tapped on the window by where you were sitting and winked and blew a kiss and felt like the biggest loser until you came outside to ask if I wanted to sit and talk with you so I did.

we hung out for a few hours and I drank two awful lattes while we were there and they were so sickeningly sweet that I wound up secretly throwing up in the bathroom. you probably didn't know that.

I hope you didn't.

I wound up bumping into you the following weekend at the same coffee shop while waiting for the same friend who was still having the same problem.

it surprised me, but I had hoped I would.

I'd spent a bunch of time on my hair before leaving the house; I was into wearing it half pulled back and wavy and was doing this stupid thing where I had all these tiny braids running through it. I wanted you to notice and you did, winding one through your fingers and making me shiver in a good way.

you bought me lunch and asked if we could get together sometime.

I said yes, of course. I tried to play it cool but I probably didn't. I never did. never do.

you kissed me and it started snowing.

that's one of the fonder memories I have of you.

---

you know I never liked modest mouse

January 23, 2013 - 5:57pm - by admin

dude I dated a few years ago was super into them.

he used to play their cds in his car all the time.

it sucked because and he would always do super-sweet things like wake up early to pick me up and take me to work even when it was his day off.

but on the mornings he'd play modest mouse it was just ruined.

I know, I know. I should be thankful that he even went out of his way in the first place. and I was.

don't get me wrong.

but their music is so intrusive and annoying and it was really hard to have a conversation

with modest mouse blasting over everything I said

especially first thing in the morning.

it's important to pick the right music to listen to when you start yr day

I'd tell him

which is why I always pick something super upbeat.

a nice 90's playlist or cbc radio 3. y'know.

but this guy

his alarm in the mornings was the intro to chop suey by system of a down

which was probably the worst thing to wake up to ever

then he'd rush out the door and listen to modest mouse in the mornings in his car

and then be mad all day.

I don't get people.

---

tragic kingdom

January 16, 2013 - 4:44pm - by admin

when I was kid I lived on this really weird street. it sort of acted like the connecting street to two major streets, main and mcphillips, and on either side of the street there were these huge fields that have since been developed into neighbourhoods with ugly stucco houses but when I was a kid there were fields.

we also had ditches in front of our houses and one side had these shallow ditches, which was the side that I lived on in our old side-by-side house with the green chain link fence out front and on the other side there were really deep ditches with wooden bridges that crossed them and were way cooler.



I was always kind of jealous that our side-by-side house wasn't on the side with the deep bridges that were good for catching tadpoles in, instead of our shallow ditches that just got your feet wet when you forgot to check in the long grass to see if there was a puddle or not before stepping.

my friend trista who lived in one of the side-by-sides across the street with the big ditch and in the summer when we weren't catching tadpoles with home-made nets that we would dangle from the bridge we would sit on her concrete front step and listen to the boombox.

she was a few years older than me and I totally looked up to her.

she had way better taste in music and always got cool cds and had way more nintendo 64 games.

she also showed me how to use a ouija board and to draw and play You Don't Know Jack on her brother's pc.

one of the summers in the late 90's when I was probably 9 or 10 and she was probably 12 or so we would sit on her concrete steps on in the cool grass and bake in the summer sun and listen to tragic kingdom on her boombox.

most of the music I heard was junky old stuff on my parents radio and tragic kingdom is the first album I remember hearing and thinking

omg this is really good

gwen stefani made no sense to me. she had weird-colored hair and wore strange clothes and her words tapped into this weird part of me that I didn't know was there. she confused me and I liked it and I must have driven trista nuts getting her to replay the album over and over.

this was around the time when all my friends were super into boy bands and I'd go to school and squeeeeeee over posters ripped out of Tiger Beat magazine of boys with their center-part haircuts but then I'd go over to tristas and listen to tragic kingdom and nevermind and clumsy and all these albums my other friends weren't listening to.

soon my family moved into a different neighbourhood without a field and ditches and more ugly stucco houses so I stopped going over there and summers with new music and boomboxes on the concrete step were over.

even though my friends in the new neighbourhood listened to cds on boom boxes and lay in the sun in our big backyards it wasn't the same. we listened to cheesy pop music and mainstream garbage and I didn't listen to that other type of music as often.

but sometimes at home I'd tune into muchmusic and watch the wedge and listen to the 'weird' music my friends weren't into.

because nobody listened to tragic kingdom.

---

omg it's Symptom Tech's birthday

October 6, 2012 - 11:13pm - by admin

it's XVI old which means sixteen, which is the age I was when I went to one of their first parties which is kinda cray to think about.



it was called 20,000 Watts Under the Sea and my dear friend and onetime fake husband on the Internet alex-lee convinced me and my friend Dyan that it'd be a good idea to lie to our parents about where we were going and go to (dum dum dum) a rave.

if you haven't been to a rave don't bother because the crap they call 'raves' today isn't the kind of rave I went to that night and from what my elders from 'the scene' tell me this was on the tail-end of when raves were good, and believe me this one was good. so good that the giant fight I had with my parents when I came home the next day was totally worth it.

I was a changed almost-woman.

since then I've gone to my fair share of 'raves' and have watched the legitimacy of those massive parties slip away into the more sophisticated club shows that you can occasionally see my face out at, and are sometimes thrown by the kids at Symptomtech who, like me, aren't kids anymore.

now we're old and jaded and talk about the 'good old days when parties were still good'.

even though they're still good, sometimes. usually when the people I know are throwing them which is the case here but nevertheless.

that party changed things for me.

as a result of that one experience I met most of the people I'm friends with now, tyrone who I've been dating for nearly three years, a trip to montreal, multiple music festivals in other provinces, and my role in MEME.

all because Symptom Tech threw a party. and alex-lee took me to it.

thanks kids, and happy anniversary!

---

I'm a sucker for covers

September 13, 2012 - 3:03am - by admin

like today we were listening to this amazing playlist on songza called space age bachelor pad and this song came on that we got up and started dancing to (yeah I know) and then I couldn't find it again

what was it? oh you know, just this cover random of a song from my fair lady by bobby darin

and damn was it a catchy cover

which led to this ridiculous 20+ min search for somewhere I could listen to it again and post here which it turns out is basically impossible. maybe it's to do with the rights on the song or something but it's nowhere to be found, and I had to buy it on itunes the old-fashioned way and have no way to share it with y'alls.

oh well, you get this wicked cake cover instead.

remember cake? how could you forget?

well I did, for a while actually and was only reminded that they existed a few years back when tyrone came over just after we'd started seeing each other. you know that phase where you make sure to gargle mouthwash and sweep yr place and make sure you didn't leave a bunch of hair in the bathroom? yeah, then.

we were having an origami date which involved sitting on the floor in my tiny living room drinking red wine on a weeknight (which I rarely do) and eating grapes and cheese and make elegant paper cranes which I was awful at and of course tyrone excelled at doing. of course.

and I don't remember why but he put on short skirt long jacket and I was blown away by the cleverness of the lyrics that honestly I'd just never really paid attention to as a stupid kid when it came out.

I think I fell in love with him a little more because he reintroduced me to cake. but don't tell him that.

afterwards he sang along to their cover of strangers in the night while we sat on the couch and it's one of my favourite songs ever and that was basically it. I was done for, totally head-over-heels.

that's all it took.

dooby-doooby-doo...

---

Neil Armstrong died today

August 26, 2012 - 2:25am - by admin

which basically means we lost one of the coolest, most important people ever, which is very sad.

I'm working on a painting for the occasion that you can most certainly buy once it's done because 1. it'll look really good and 2. I could use some tuition money right about now because baby's gotta buy some new textbooks.

though I'll be sad to part with this one because space is really cool and it's important that we explore it and painting someone I've looked up to since I was a wee lass is kind of, I don't know, cathartic for me?

the first nerdy thing I was into besides video games as a kid was space thanks to my dad who taught me about constellations and planets and let me put a huge map of the constellations from one of his 70's national geographics up on my bedroom wall which I swear was cooler than it sounds.

as I got older and started putting up magazine cut-outs of boy bands and liked and leonardo dicaprio and all those other 90's teen heartthrobs with their center-part haircuts up on my wall and the star map -which I realize now was probably super outdated- stayed up, there in the middle of the evidence of my early raging tweeny hormones.

even when my bitchy tweeny friends made fun of me for having it up, it stayed up there for most of my early adolescence until I became "too cool" to put stuff up on my walls completely, and then the poster which was by now totally frayed and falling apart went into the garbage with all the other glossy pictures of people I'd never met.

I don't miss the pictures of boy bands with shitty hair and shittier music

but I miss that poster.

---

last night I watched Across The Universe

August 24, 2012 - 4:21pm - by admin

which I saw in a theatre in Hamilton a few years ago back when I lived there but didn't really get to watch for a few reasons

1. the kids in front of us brought beer into the theatre and my bf at the time was 'allergic to beer' (even though he drank sometimes -in hindsight I think he was just a lightweight a-hole) and heard the cans cracking open and smelled it because they were a row ahead of us and got mad.

2. the same kids started singing along after a few beers and he got madder.

3. after a whisper-fight about the kids in front of us drinking beer and singing and whether or not my now ex-bf should yell at them (hint: he did anyway) he moved a seat away from me and glared at me for the rest of the movie.

4. my ex didn't like the beatles and especially didn't like movies where people did covers of original songs so getting him to come with me was like pulling teeth. I mean, he got mad that they covered 'somebody to love' in happy feet.

anyway I remember being super jazzed about it coming out because you know I've always loved the beatles ever since I was introduced to them by my senior-year highschool boyfriend who was obsessed with them. he also loved tupac and the white stripes but stories about him are stories for another day.

the reason I didn't start listening to the beatles until I was in highschool was because my british mum hates the beatles which I didn't realize was actually allowed, her being british and all, but there ya go. as a result my memories of the beatles remind me of the apartment he had after we graduated and appleton's rum and parquet flooring.

but the movie reminds me of someone else, and the fight we had in the movie theatre.

or at least it did.

now it reminds me of ice cream and hugs and blogging.

funny how things change.

---

remember the tv show scrubs?

August 24, 2012 - 12:49am - by admin

with what's his name with the hair who was in garden state and fantasized about being a floating head doctor that was on in the early 2000's. I used to watch it with my friend eric when I was in highschool but you probably didn't know that.

anyway I just found out that Ted the neurotic lawyer's barbershop quartet that he has in that one episode is actually a legit barbershop quartet in real life and they went on the BBC and did a cover of a bunch of songs including some katy perry track I've never heard of.

though I think it's safe to assume their version is better.

---

Once I knew a boy who owned a skateboard

May 27, 2012 - 5:04pm - by admin

it was a few years ago and he was a cute guy from my high school who I'd always thought was a bit of a dumbass but he was popular and all the ladies loved him and I couldn't figure out why.

we reconnected while I was sitting outside having a beer with friends at the Toad in the Hole and he went by on his skateboard and we started chatting and didn't stop for the next month or so. most of our correspondence was veiled jabs at one another because we clearly both came from different worlds which didn't collide nicely.

I think he thought I was stuck up which I was and I think I thought he was useless, which he was.

he picked me up once in a beatup old red car wearing a fluffy plaid parka and a toque even though it was only early fall. there was no radio and he had groceries from his mom's kitchen in the backseat. he held my hand because it was colder in the car than it was outside. at his place we tried to watch Brazil but his pirated copy didn't work so we watched Bronson instead and made out on his couch, interrupted only once by his lesbian roommate who made a point of talking about how she was a lesbian which I thought was overcompensating a bit.

the apartment had walls of either wood panelling or brick, and the furniture were all scruffy antiques except the shelves that housed his record collection, which were 2x4s held up with cinder blocks and covered in paper doilies probably stolen from somewhere. at one point we listened to Bob Dylan, sipping cheap beers and listening to the freezing rain.

it was like being in a Wes Anderson movie.

but when I got up to use the bathroom I walked by his bedroom and saw the mattress on the floor with the dirty sheets and the pile of car tires that he was going to sell at some point, or so he said, I knew that it was over.

I was too much of a snob, and he was too useless for us to be anything but offensive to one another.

but sometimes when I hear Visions of Johanna I remember the time I let that boy who really wasn't good for me at all put his hand up my shirt while the record skipped and the rain came down, even though I knew I shouldn't have. I knew it was over and I knew it was useless but I think I kissed him harder and enjoyed the moment more knowing that once it ended, that was it.

so we kissed like we didn't mean anything to each other, which we didn't.

and that was alright.

---