Tidy Math

Was up until 4 going through all the papers in my room. Trying to make this small space into a home office/bedroom for a human instead of bunch of paper/where I sleep, which is really more hamster.

Paper to recycle = approximately one paper grocery bag full.

Headshots = stack 3.5 inches thick

Binders = best invention ever?

Post-its as labels = thank you Romy and Michelle

Sorting and shelving everything to do with 546 = closure

Reclaiming my floor space + small desk with tidy surface + folders, labels, clips and clamps = better than Prozac

The Culture Shocker

So I think a lot of people tend to think I'm sooooper nice when a lot of the time I have to work hard to keep a lid being soooooper bitchy. This is partly because I'm Canadian in America and 1) I'm supposed to be nice and 2) Americans can mistake polite for nice (don't be fooled, Americans! Those Brits who you think are being really nice? They're subtextually telling you to go fuck yourself. Unlike the French, who are actually telling you to go fuck yourself. But I digress).

I don't why I am so annoyed at being thought of as nice. It's not especially bad, I guess. But I also guess that it is: passive, milquetoast-y, feminine, boring, unopinionated, and the prerequisite state for being taken advantange of.

Also, a lot of people at school get me mixed up with this other person who is geniunely nice in a way that I am not. Like, really nice and quite sweet and good at being really accomodating and helpful. I am overjoyed to report she's got some inner rage, and yet her niceness prevails. Lately I feel my inner rage getting away from me.

But perhaps I'm just afraid of what I'll be like if I don't keep the nice shields up. What if during an attack of frustration the shields dropped to 80 percent, then 40 percent, then disappeared altogether? Maybe it's like that time I stopped shaving my legs just to see how bad it would really get. Because, folks, it didn't really get that bad and then I was free.

When It Goes Past Smart And Gets Into Stupid

My head's felt peculiar for the last few hours.

Perhaps this will excuse my irrational behaviour of a couple hours ago when I went into a video store (wonderful anachronistic name, "video store", a misnomer on top of misnomer) to get a copy of Dr. No so I can commence my shitty paper when I realised that half of the DVDs in the store were for sale, for pretty cheap. I was looking in the 2 for $20 and there was nothing good but then there was a rack of 2 for $5 and hot damn, Princess Mononoke was there! And wow, the 2 for $5 section of the store was big and also had Pirates of the Caribbean, which I've planned on owning ever since I saw it three times in the theatre and hey, I can use a copy of Election and wow! so cheap and I had (o this is so embarrasing) 5 DVDs in my hands before I realised I was in the (yeah) rental section and not the buying section.

I'm already the kind of OCD person who, when shopping alone, will go back to browse the same thing nine to twelve times, but this was really above and beyond the irrational call of duty for me.

I hope you all have enjoyed the Canadian spellings included in this post.

If all else fails, you will surely be entertained by this resin-cast Goblin King and his this-is-not-a-Disney-film package.

Getting Lost

I don't even want to reveal how much time I have wasted as a result of having borrowed season one of Lost from Sarah.

Let's just say she lent it on Saturday and I'm now on disc four. The end of disc four.

Okay.

This is why I could never be trusted around serious drugs.

But it's great, addictive. I would suggest throwing in a few more tidbits of what people actually have to set up to survive on an island (cf. Robinson Crusoe) cause weird ingenuity is always fun, but that's a minor quibble. For the most part it's madly weird and great and the cute hobbit is especially great: cute, hobbity, and v. funny (cf. diary-reading). And some truly enjoyable backstory twists.

But the most fun for me is not wondering what's going to happen next, but what the writers are going to come up with next and that's actually, for me, the entertaining aspect of this. I've been so story fixated lately that I watch the show going: okay, they have three directions this story could go, which one will they pick? And then they pick something I haven't even thought of.

Touche.

Situational Irony OR Alanis Morisette Was So Right

Today at work, because I was so grumpy, I started fixating on the number of people to whom the words "please" and "thank you" seem to be an unknown alien language. There were many many many. Including people who couldn't manage to conjure up a "Thanks" to smoothly conclude a phone conversation. I'll admit I let the silence linger to an uncomfortable length and then said "Well, bye" which was not as jerky as saying "You're welcome."

And then someone came and asked me to do something really annoying and said please, like, eight times. And thank you right after every please.

For the rest of you though: is it so hard? I've worked a lot of customer service jobs and I tell you: you be considerate and appreciate me and I'll work hard to make you happy.

If you've never worked such a job, it would do you well to consider yourself fortunate when dealing with people who do have such jobs. There but for the grace of MinWa go you.

Plus, your mom was right about good manners. They make the world go round.

Time to Whip the Caulk Out

All those people who complain about blogs: if you really want to get rid of them, get rid of the necessity of washing dishes and doing paperwork. Then we'll all go outside or fall asleep on the couch, and not live in this faux borderland between getting shit done and wasting time.

But anyway: I came home on Thursday to find that tiny ants had colonized my kitchen. They were taking scenic tours through my pile of bags of Trader Joe's mixed nuts. They were spelunking under the fridge. They were running sporting events along the edge of the rug. And they were hosting full-fledged formal dances under the corner cabinet.

Now, I'm a post-colonialist, myself. I don't take my territory being taken over by other factions lying down. Look what happened in Africa for chrissakes. And my wonderful mother had just bought me a vacuum.

You can guess what happened next. A lot of squishing. A lot of satisfying ant-disappearing acts up the mouth of my fearsome loud Dirt Devil. A lot of spraying vinegar in large puddles on the floor.

Today I bought some poison for them. So far they like it very much.



I also got some caulk to seal up the massive gap between the baseboard and the floor that currently acts as a red carpet into my house for everything on six legs. Though they be many, they are no match for me, for I have access to the hardware store.

Also: Tilda Swinton is to Broken Flowers as Cate Blanchett is to The Shipping News. And I love them both.

Haru Ga Kita, Yo