Treat Yo’self

This Friday I have a vacation day and I decided that since my budget isn’t looking too bad, I’d treat myself to a trip to... the 2013 Fall Creativ festival!



I just know I’m going to end up running around like a kid in a candy store. There’s gonna be yarn, sewing machines, rubber stamps, cardstock, buttons and doodads and notions, even Wow Wow Nails, the exclusive Toronto dealer for Konad nail art stamping plates, is going to be there!

My poor wallet, LOL. But it’s okay, my budget is rock solid for this month. Hell, I’ll probably still have enough money at the end of October to buy the paperback version of A Dance With Dragons. Winter is COMING y’all. ;D

A Funny Thing Happened On The Twitters

I really liked Jamie Oliver back before he decided to get on his soapbox, now I find him just meh. His heart is in the right place but (to get all Tumblr up in here) he needs to check his privilege.

C.S. Lewis Is A Life Ruiner

So I’ve finished all of the Narnia books and I have to say... that last one left a really bad taste in my mouth. The basic summary goes thusly: everything is weird and goes to shit, plus Susan is barred from heaven for no real reason. Seriously, I feel like Lewis crapped all over what could have been a joyous and happy moment by excluding her from the final novel, for... what, really? Punished her for liking girly things? Seriously?? Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest sister in my family, but it felt a bit like a slap in the face.

Also, the last novel had a lot more Calormene evilness in it, and that shit was just way too racist for me to handle. It was bad enough to deal with in The Horse and His Boy but, like, really? The entire series we only ever meet TWO Calmormenes who are not terrible people: Aravis and Emeth. And yes, I get it, they’re the Bad Guys, but to make them so heavy-handedly “eastern” and I DON’T CARE, “DARKIE” IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE NICKNAME EVER.

Sigh.

It’s just too bad, really. I enjoyed the first two books and adored Voyage. Silver Chair and Magician’s Nephew are kind of boring but had interesting parts. Then everything fell apart after that and I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth at the end.

In related news, apparently they’re going to make a movie for The Silver Chair? I still haven’t seen any of the movies yet, so that’s going to be my new Netflix challenge. :)

Current Best of Dance Videos

I haven’t done a “EDM videos that don’t suck” post in a while! There are a lot lately, mad props to the DJs.

1. Zedd ft. Foxes – Clarity



My first pick because I saw Zedd live a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. This was the big song everyone was awaiting of course. I’ve loved it since it first came out, not only is the video visually interesting, but the lyrics and tune are so fantastic to sing along to. But when I went to the concert, there was this interesting moment where all you could hear was the women singing the chorus at the tops of their lungs, and then every man there shouted out the “ayyyyy-ayyyyy ayyy-ayyy-ayyyyy” part right before the beat drops. It was perfect and magical. :D

2. Icona Pop – All Night



All musicians should watch the extended video for this song, it’s basically a lesson on how to highlight a subculture without being appropriative. This video is fun, fabulous, and makes me want to watch Paris Is Burning.

3. Jacques Lu Cont & Alex Metric – Safe With You



I was sold the moment this video began: EDM + figure skating = win. I don’t know, this video just gives me feels. Reminds me when I first fell in love with Virtue & Moir back in 2010.

Books Ahoy

I’ve been a bit of a reading machine lately. In the last month, I’ve finished off 5 books in total. On to the reviews! (As always, spoilers lie beyond here.)

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: I mentioned this book before and how it was everything I ever dreamed of in a large, sprawling novel. In all honestly though the first half of the book is more interesting than the second half. There’s such a wide range of interesting characters like Ayumi, the Dowager, Fuka-Eri, Komatsu, and Professor Ebisuno. But they all sort of disappear as the novel moves into the second half, focusing on the epic fated love of Aomame and Tengo instead of conspiracies and the nature of writing. Would have preferred more of Ayumi and Aomame picking up guys in expensive bars and less of Tengo visiting his comatose father. And I wish they had explained more of what exactly the Little People were, whether Fuka-Eri was the maza or dohta, why there was a second moon in the sky, etc. But still, excellent read. I’d give it a score of 8/10.

A Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: I started reading this book and feeling incredibly bored by this tale of small-town plebes and their trivial, insignificant small-town problems. In fact, that’s how I felt for the majority of the book. It just so happened that at some point, I desperately wanted to know what happened to these petty jerks. All the characters were so incredibly flawed that I had no sympathy for most of them. But after a certain point, I wanted everything to turn out alright for these petty jerks, but I knew that wouldn’t happen because it was an adult novel, not a Bollywood movie. So I went on Wikipedia and read the ending, which was probably a good thing because the ending was incredibly saddening and unfulfilling and I would have thrown the book out the window if I hadn’t known beforehand. Read the book if it somehow falls into your lap. Or not, whatever. One can live without it. I give it a score of 6.5/10.

Chronicles of Narnia – Yes, the whole series. I’m not done the whole thing yet (currently I’m in the middle of The Silver Chair) but I have thoughts for the moment. The books I’ve read so far in order are: The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and Voyage of the Dawntreader. Yup, going in published order. I actually read TLWW years ago (and The Magician’s Nephew too) but I think I wasn’t even in high school yet. Aaanyways, yes I’ve been making my way through the series. And obviously I knew going in that the whole series is a giant Bible parallel but man, non-Christian me gets the jibblies sometimes with the heavy-handedness of it all. Lewis is very clear about things he believe are Right and things that are Wrong, and sometimes I just throw my hands in the air at his beliefs. Anyway, the stories are still really engaging. My favourite so far is actually VDT, which I thought I would dislike because sailing = blah. But there was something magical about the journey to the east, the sunlight and the calm sweet waters. PC was most interesting at the beginning and the end, while the middle was a lump of boring. TLWW was interesting as well, but since I had read it once already I had a vague recollection of most of the details, which made it less engaging. Thus far SC has been rather annoying; Eustace and Jill are by far the most annoying and hasty children to grace the series thus far. I miss Lucy, LOL.

Praise Where Praise Is Due

I remember learning once in school that people are more likely to leave reviews for service or products when the review is a negative one. For that reason, I make an effort to inform people when something goes right or if I have a good experience. Here are two such recent examples.

1. Rogers

It’s actually no secret... I hate Rogers. But in a very specific way. I don’t like the prices they charge, I don’t like their packages, their offerings are so limited and inflexible, and I lord help you if you try to call them with an issue. There is an exception to their generally crappy customer service though, and that is the @RogersHelps twitter account. Bless those account users, they sure try their darndest to help.

It all started two Sundays ago, when my internet suddenly ground to a crawl. No matter what I did to the computer or router or modem, I just couldn’t get the connection to improve. I shouted my anger to the skies aka tweeted my agony to @RogersHelps and they did their best to help out, but in the end they set up a technician visit for me. And while Rogers has crap customer service, their technicians sure are pros. The guy came by a couple days later and found out my modem was broken, so he gave me a new one, as well as new ethernet cables, just in case. Well played, Rogers. But I’m still leaving you once my contract is up. :P

2. Groupon

I’ve been known to use Groupon every now and then, mostly for services. (e.g. haircuts, massages, pedicures, etc.) A couple weeks ago, I decided my shoulders had had enough and it was time for another massage. I checked out the best deals online, compared websites and resources between all the different companies, and finally decided on purchasing a groupon from my top pick. This week, I tried to make an appointment and found the phone number was firstly wrong on the Groupon page, then when I went to check the correct number on the website I discovered the website was gone. D: Good thing Google caches everything, so I found the right phone number on a cached version of the site... but the phone line was out of service. Double plus ungood! At this point, if everything had suddenly resolved itself (phone and website fixed) I still would have felt too sketched out by this company to use their services anymore, so I requested Groupon look into it. Less than 24 hours later, I find an email in my inbox confirming a full refund in Groupon bucks. Would have preferred a refund directly to my credit card, but this will do.

Where Once Was Earth...

I had a strange dream a couple weeks ago that continues coming back to my memory for reasons unknown. Here’s the lowdown...

In my dream, my family and I are all together on a space shuttle/pod orbiting the earth. We monitor the controls periodically to make sure that everything’s on course, but otherwise we’re just living out in space for no presumable reason. The whole time we’re up there, I’m comforted by the fact that I can see Earth right out the viewing window, but being in space still makes me incredibly uneasy. (I’m a Capricorn; give me solid ground or give me death!)

Then one day my worst fear is imagined. I can’t remember if one of my siblings accidentally knocked the controls or if someone was manipulating everything from Earth, but suddenly the ship begins to accelerate and change course, and we are streaming through space as blue-green contrails of stars streak by. When we finally manage to get the space craft to stop moving, we’ve traveled light-years away from our holding orbit... and the goddamn ship doesn’t have an interstellar map to show us which way we went or how to get back. I can’t remember if we ended up traveling to another galaxy or just another star system, either way it was really damn far. I remember when the ship finally stopped and I looked out the window and all I could see was a giant grey nebula in the distance and a dark brown planet... the profound feeling of being lost, alone, displaced, adrift, etc. was terrible.

The rest of the dream turned out sort of oddly. Somehow me and my siblings beamed down to the brown planet and found it to be inhabited by a race of vicious aliens that sort of looked like a cross between Predators and Zerg. Yeah, big do not want, especially the giant razor-claws for hands thing. D: We were sneaking around one of their castles trying not to get caught, and we found this flight of stairs on the outside of a turret that would lead us to the ground, but as we started running down it, we realized that there were guards at the bottom and guards hot on our heels. We were trapped. Except I was like “no, we’re not trapped, we can jump off these stairs from 50 feet up and fly over to that bridge and get back to the ship”. And of course my siblings were like “um, what??” But there was no time to explain to them that we were in a dream, so I just linked my arms with theirs told them to jump... and we started to plummet to the ground. But I increased my willpower and soon our decent stopped, and linked together we floated upwards to the bridge that led us back to the ship.

I woke up soon after that. Anyways, it's the part where the ship starts to zoom away from Earth that freaked me out the most, and that's the part I keep remembering. Of course. :P

Cronut Be Damned! CNE Exploits 2013

For anyone living in Toronto, we all know that the CNE heralds the end of summer. I like to go every year to enjoy the sights and sounds and delicious foods of course. This year the big item was the vaunted cronut burger (for those not in the know, a cronut is the delicious conglomeration of a croissant and a donut) but alas, on the first weekend of the CNE opening 150 people got sick with Staph aureus from eating the cronut burger... eww.

But a little bacterial toxin never stopped me! So my friend and I braved the possibility to gastrointestinal distress and headed over after work last week.

First stop, the Food Building for dinner. Even though we had pre-decided that we would avoid any potential stomach issues by only eating vegetarian food, we quickly fell under the thrall of a restaurant called Bison that featured (you guessed it) bison meat. I bought the bison sausage while my friend bought the bison burger, then we split each in half and shared. I liked the burger better and she liked the sausage better.





After the main course it was time for desert! My friend got a dozen Tiny Tom cinnamon donuts and I got... a deep fried Mars bar! Let me tell you people, it was freaking delicious. Full of melty chocolate, warm caramel, sugar saturated goodness.



After that we walked around the International Exhibition (where my friend got distracted by really cheap Mavi jeans) and enjoyed the midway with all its lights and sounds and teenagers way too intent on winning giant stuffed Minions. ;)







And so we bid farewell to another all-to-brief Canadian summer. Until next year!

Nightvaleian Non-Nightmares

I think Welcome to Night Vale is finally getting to me!

Last night I had a dream that I was vacationing at a beach and some kids were jumping around on these giant rocks that were half-submerged in the lake. I was apparently kind of lucid dreaming because I knew that the two rocks furthest out in the water weren’t rocks, but were actually giant zombie water creatures. They looked like Lovecraftian whale-kodama if that makes any sense. Anyway the moment the kids jumped on the last rock, three or four of these creatures woke up and stood fully upright in the waters and started speaking in very cheerful English. They said they wanted everyone in the city to gather on the beach in the evening and they would set off fireworks and sing us the glorious ancient songs of their kind. Since it was a bit of a tourist city, lots of people were excited about this and started camping out on the beach. However, I was rooming with a couple of friends who had moved to the city two years ago and they knew that where they were from weird = bad. The beach house that we were staying in had a special room that I had never gone into, but I always noticed it because it had weird patterns and textured stuff on its door and the outer walls. So my friends were like “yeah no, when those things start singing, get in this room and don’t leave until the sun rises the next day.” And because I was kind of lucid dreaming, I knew that was because when the whale-kodama started singing, anyone who could hear it would go insane and their brain would dissolve and their skin would fall off. Swell.

So as the evening approached the creatures’ booming voices appeared again and they presented the fireworks without a hitch. At this point all the tourists were having fun outside and the locals had disappeared. Me and my friends were already holed up in the secret room, but it had a sliding glass door that opened up right to the boardwalk, so when we saw some frantic homeless locals freaking out we let them into our room of safety at the last minute. Then the whale-kodama’s started this weird humming/chanting type thing and all you could hear was terrible, terrible screams outside. However, in my dream this was not as nightmarish at it sounded; in true pseudo Night Vale-esque fashion, we spent some time getting to know the thankful hobos we rescued, and one of them even baked us a delicious hobo pie while we waited for the terror outside to end. Mmm... pie.

Not Like I’ve Ever Shopped There

There’s an article doing the rounds on Twitter regarding Lululemon having some internal practices that effectively shun plus-sized shoppers. The whole thing is pretty rage inducing even for me, someone who is not a plus-sized shopper at all. But in all honesty, Lululemon (and its ilk like TNA and Aritsia) have been raising my hackles since I first saw them at my local shopping mall.

If being healthy was really about being healthy, it wouldn’t matter what you wear while you’re getting healthy. But consumerism fucks up everything; trendy name-brand workout gear is mandatory to demonstrate your commitment and passion for being healthy. You are not the sum of your actions (i.e. working out), you are the sum of your outfit (i.e. LOOKING like you work out).

It’s not enough that women need to be skinny, but in order to get there we ought to shell out our hard-earned cash for overpriced third-world-made clothing too. And for what? Why? Your muscles do not work harder while wearing designer clothes. Your heart does not pump harder if the Lululemon logo is displayed on your ass. I just don’t understand what the point is.

But my personal rant aside, Lululemon’s policy is terrible. Skinny does NOT equal healthy. Healthy equals healthy. :P

CBC Fail

Really, CBC? In what universe is that a relevant or appropriate cover photo for the headline next to it?? A young man died and you advertise it with tits? BOOURNS! So tasteless.

Writing Prompt #1 - What's in the Barn?

I found this very cool writing prompt website that I’m going to start using, both to generate blog posts and to continue flexing my writerly muscles. You can check it out for yourself here: Creative Writing Prompts

Prompt - Late at night you awake to find your wife/husband out of bed. Exploring the farmhouse, you find no lights on and the kids are still sound asleep. Past the fields, you see light shining out of the barn. When you walk out there and open the door, what do you find?

I’m expecting to see Francis sitting at his workbench, putting lacquer on the bookshelf or fixing the riding mower. But he’s nowhere to be found. Who turned the light on then?

I pull my robe around me tightly and take a few steps inside. “Honey? Are you in here?” No answer. But then I notice something shift at the back, behind a large curtain that covers an old mirror we’ve been meaning to restore for ages. “Hello?” I pause, getting the sense that I’m not the one in danger here. “It’s okay, you can come out.”

Holding my breath and waiting, I eventually see a small child emerge from the shadows. A girl, probably the same age as my little Myriam. Same dark hair and dark eyes as my daughter too, but the way her cheekbones stick out, the angles of her shoulders and elbows, the too-large dress draped over her thin frame... she clearly isn’t well.

My voice is barely a whisper as I try to coax her forward. “Hi, sweetheart. What are you doing in here?”

She looks past me with a scared expression. “He said he’d bring me a surprise.”

“Who said that?”

A low voice replies from behind me. “I did.” Francis walks past me and I can see relief in the girl’s eyes. He’s carrying a giant bag of candy, the kind that we keep hidden in basement cellar so that the kids can’t get their hands on them whenever they want. I silently watch as the girl creeps forward and sits on the floor of the barn with my husband, the two of them pouring through the bag of candy and selecting which ones they want. Kids always like Francis, mostly because he gives them exactly what they want. As he sits there wolfing down candy with her, my mind is whirring down a different course. This girl doesn’t look like any of the neighbouring kids, and whoever was caring for her wasn’t doing a well enough job. Where did she come from?

Without warning, the girl freezes with a look of panic on her face. “They’re coming for me.”

Francis gives me a brief look. “Don’t worry, we’re going to make sure you’re fi-“

A deafening boom echoes outside, like fighter jets are flying low and just broke the sound barrier. The girl screams, high-pitched and terrified. I try to grab both her and my husband at the same time but a blinding flash suddenly illuminates everything. I fumble, my fingers graze someone’s sleeve but I’m not sure whose, and I trip forward and land on the soft hay floor. The roar continues to split my head, making it impossible to speak over the noise, but then I feel the girl’s small hand on my shoulder. I feel a strange tug in the air, like a wave of pressure is pulling me towards some mysterious centre. I want to ask what’s going on, my eyes are beginning to recover from the flash of light. But the most I can do is turn back to look at Francis, who is sitting behind me with a handful of my bathrobe held tight in his fist. Then there’s a second wave, stronger than the first, and pricks of darkness crowd my vision. I’m falling, passing out, and I can only hope that I will wake up soon.

Pursuing The Dream: Hair & Nails Edition

For a little more than over a year now, I’ve noticed that my hair is no longer the hair I’ve been accustomed to. At first I thought it was because I was growing my hair out instead of keeping my usual bob, but it’s more than that. I also think hormones might have something to do with it; my nails aren’t doing so well either, and I thought maybe it was just that I was using nail polish more but I’m starting to think this is a keratin problem. :P

So I’ve developed a loose plan of attack to address some of my issues:

1. Stop combing my hair when it’s wet. This used to never be an issue because the comb would glide through my hair without stopping. But lately my head is just tangle central, even at the roots! So it’s not just #longhairproblems unfortunately.
2. Find a good leave-in treatment. Because if I’m not going to comb my hair after a shower, I need some way for it to be manageable! Friends have suggested that VO5 hot oil treatment but I will go for something more authentic like coconut oil. Desi stylez y’all!
3. Stop touching my hair or poking at my scalp all the time, which just makes my hair oily when I don’t want it to be. Hard habit to break, it’s a mindless tic I have.
4. Buy Bautiste, which is a dry shampoo. Dry shampoos are these sprays you can use in-between showers to maintain your hair’s volume and freshness, and to reduce that gross oily look hair can get.
5. Maybe – buy biotin, which supposedly enhances the look of hair and nails. Double bonus! But I hear that stuff is expensive, so we’ll see.
6. Maybe – get a satin scarf or pillowcase, because apparently cotton sheets can be abrasive to hair. But as a tried and true skeptic, especially when it comes to beauty and fashion, I might pass on it. Seems excessive, like sleeping in an oxygen casket to prolong your life. ;)

While I’m at it, I think I will try to improve things on the nail front as well. In addition to potential biotin use mentioned above, I will try to -

1. Consistently moisturize. I already have the right tools in place, I just ain’t doin’ it right. I have The Body Shop’s Hemp Hand Cream underneath my kitchen sink (because I wash my dishes by hand, OLD SCHOOL Y’ALL) and it’s super nourishing. I just need to remember to use it more often. I also have Burt’s Bees Cuticle Balm right on my night table, but I don’t use it before bed like I should.
2. Improve my diet/nutrients. Sigh, this is always a struggle. I’m lucky if I manage to eat actual meal food for my meals, as opposed to cake or Ringolos. (Side note: hell yeah Ringolos!) If I’m eating lasagne for dinner, I’m just proud of myself for eating a Real Dinner. I’m not concerned with salt intake or fat content. I’m concerned with “what is easy to make and won’t make me hate the kitchen?”

Not So Strong and Free

Most of the time I am a very proud Canadian. Today is not one of those days. What’s gotten under my skin? Well, Canada’s treatment of First Nations people has always left a bad taste in my mouth but a recent study demonstrates that the government actively allowed children and adults starving on reserves to continue to starve, so that they could use them as test subjects in nutritional studies.

Listen, this is beyond mind-boggling. Imagine for a second you’re at home, enjoying the comfort and normalcy of your modest house, when some strange dude walks through the door, declares that the house and everything inside it now belongs to him and his family, but don’t worry, you can still stay in the unfinished basement cellar, there’s a window for light and you’re protected from the elements, you should be grateful he didn’t just, like, shoot you or something when he came in. But he’s a pretty awesome dude, and because he cares he’s giving you some space and for their own good, he’s taking your kids to live with his cousin 500km away, she’ll take care of them properly. So don’t be so noisy down there, don’t try to hold on to any of the life you had before he took over everything you knew and loved, you’re free to leave and walk away whenever you want, or if you pay him a fee you could totally rent out a room upstairs instead. But it’ll be hard to come up with the extra money, because totally awesome dudes just like him have taken over your neighbourhood and have nothing but disdain for your modest ways and strange language and clearly inferior beliefs.

And then a hundred years later, when your children's children's children are still trying to recover from being ripped away from their way of life, everyone blames them for not being as awesome as the dudes living in houses. Go figure.

Freedomland

When I was a kid/teen, I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of moving to America. Not only cause all my stuff was here in the great white north, but because I found their gun laws completely terrifying. That so called land of opportunity down south was also a land of terrible violence.

When I was officially an adult and went off to university, I added another factor to my “I Don’t Want To Move To America” list: lack of universal healthcare. Since I was finally living away from home, I was facing the new experiences of visiting campus health centres and getting my own prescriptions. At first I grumbled about having to fork out any sort of money for medication, until I realized how lucky I was that it was the only thing I paid for, and that at a discount. I don’t pay for doctor’s visits or exams or routine tests, even during the times I was without employee benefits.

My twenties and teens are now long behind me and I’m seeing the world from a much more adult perspective. And add to the list another reason why moving to America terrifies me: anti-abortion laws. I just can’t fathom that a nation and the people (let’s be real, the MEN) who govern it could be so hostile to truth and agency and compassion towards half the population. I want no part of that! In fact I wish I could do more to change things down south but hey, I’m not USian.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to move and live someplace else in the world but I know it’ll never stick. For what it’s worth, my heart is stuck in Canada. :)

#cornproblems

I’ve got some serious business to discuss today: corn on the cob. Shout out to @chotirani for forcing my hand on this issue. ;)

For as long as I can remember, I have always eaten corn on the cob one way and one way only: row by row. By which I mean horizontally. I have a very specific system.

1. To start, I pick a spot in the middle of the cob and take a bite that encompasses 4 rows of kernels, no more and no less.
2. Following the first bite, I eat the rest of the rows to the right of the initial bite, then the rows to the left of the initial bite.
3. Then I rotate the cob clockwise and take another bite from the middle (again 4 rows wide) and repeat step 2.
4. I repeat step 3 two more times and always just two more times because for some reason, all corn is made equal. By which I mean there is always 4 × 4 rows of corn kernels in a cob. My method for eating corn is mathematically sound.

So there you have it, my efficient and logical methodology for eating corn on the cob. You should all use it and if you’re not, rethink your corn eating lifestyle.

(I also probably eat corn the way I do partially because of a Bugs Bunny cartoon I saw as a very young child, where he ate his corn like he was a typewriter. Television, y’all. Just as influential as you imagined.)

My Freshness Scarcity

I’ve done a fair bit of grocery shopping in the last couple days and I’ve come to notice something: my fridge is always empty.

This isn’t to say I don’t buy food, but it’s that the kind of food I tend to buy doesn’t need to be refrigerated. My freezer is always fully stocked. My cupboards are exploding. But the fridge is sort of sad looking, with nothing but a cartoon of orange juice, some sauces in the door, a bottle of wine, a tub of margarine, some cheese and yogurt, and maybe some milk if the weekend is close.

I tend not to buy perishable fresh food because I am too flighty to stick to a weekly meal plan. Plus, even regular portion sizes are too much for me to consume before the expiry date. Why buy a 12-pack of eggs when I only need 2 per week? Why buy a whole celery bunch when I just need a single stalk? Why buy a litre of milk when I only drink 250 mL on the weekend? In the end, the extras wouldn’t be consumed and would go to waste, so I just don’t bother. But dry goods like pasta and rice last forever in my cupboards! My freezer is stocked to the brim with fruits, meat, and vegetables, as well as favourites like pizza and lasagne.

Now that I think about it, I don’t really buy bread either. It’s something that I don’t consistently eat, I only want it once in a blue moon, but I’m not going to buy 20 slices of the stuff when all I want is toast with jam maybe once every two months, it’d be a waste.

Honestly, I wish the sizes of my fridge and freezer were switched! It would be way more useful to me.

The Conscientious Shopper

This past Friday evening, I was out shopping for a Father’s Day present after work. I didn’t find what I was looking for, and I could have just gone straight home after that but it was payday, so I thought there’d be no harm in looking for some new clothes. I ended up wandering into Dynamite and heading to their sales rack. I found a very cute black belted dress with tiny white polka dots there, and it was marked down big time! So I took it to the dressing room, hung the dress up, and started undoing all the buttons so that I’d be able to try it on. But as I undid the buttons, I glanced up to the tag and froze at what I saw.

“Made In Bangladesh”

After a moment of paralysis, I slowly backed away from the dress and contemplated it. After the collapse of that factory building, I’ve developed a distaste for clothing from Bangladesh. But it was pretty and affordable; did I still want it? I decided the answer was no. I didn’t want to support cheap third-world clothes, and besides I didn’t need a new dress. So I touched up my makeup in the mirror and walked back out of the dressing room.

In an ideal world, I’d only buy products that were made in Canada. But Canada isn’t really a manufacturer of clothes, and when they do it’s usually out of my price range. But I still buy clothes that are made in China even though the same situation as Bangladesh is probably playing itself out there too. It’s hard to figure out what the right thing to do is.

The Best Thing A Writer Can Do Is Read

Before I realized that getting more sleep would be a good way to kick-start my writerly inspiration, I decided that doing more reading might be the ticket. You see, I’ve given up a lot of things since I became a home-owner... that mortgage ain’t gonna pay itself! Sometimes it’s the little things that matter, so I gave up (amongst other things) buying new books. Because let’s be honest, books are expensive, especially in Canada.

Thankfully, I got a ton of Chapters gift cards over the holidays and finally decided to use one up. My purchase was the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; I’d heard great things about Murakami’s writing and the novel’s plot seemed right up my alley. Indeed, this gargantuan book has everything: sex, espionage, an exploration of the nature of writing, parallel universes, vengeful feminists, cults, and paranormal activities.

This past week I was feeling like I'd made significant progress in the book, but then I came to a plot point where I realized the author had just set up the crux of the novel... 344 pages in. I am LESS THAN ONE THIRD through this book. D: It's like the literary equivalent of a progressive house song; it's 9 minutes long and the bass doesn't drop until 4 minutes in.

In any case, this is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Can't wait to see where else it takes me!

It's All Coming Back To Me Now

Slowly but surely, a change is coming into my life... I’m starting to dream at night again.

Let me explain. For starters, I always dream, that’s never changed since I was a wee one. And my dreams have never really been average, but quite vivid, fantastical, lucid, and extremely easy for me to remember in great detail upon waking. Seriously, my subconscious has come up with epic House MD episodes that would have put David Shore to shame. ;)

But I noticed that around the time I turned 30, my dreams changed. They became a lot more boring for one; dreaming about working in the office or watching TV with the family really doesn’t compare to dreaming that you’ve runaway with fairies to an alternate dimension and chilled in Father Time’s garden along the way. Not only did they become more mundane, but I couldn’t even remember them once I woke up, only vague feelings of mediocrity lingered behind.

I assumed it was just a complication of getting older, my brain just wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Then, about a month ago, I changed my sleeping patterns. Basically, I got more of it haha. As opposed to going to bed around 11:30pm-12am every weeknight, I committed to going to bed at 10:30pm instead. Not only did I noticed I’d be far less tired in the morning, but gradually my dreams have gone back to being grand and vivid and epic. It’s not completely the same as it used to be (I’m still having issues remembering details when I wake up) but it’s definite progress towards a place I want to be in.

I never realized how important my epic dreams were to me until they started to fade away. Last night I dreamed that it was like 200 years in the future and I was canoeing down some Vietnamese river with a group of grumpy rebels working to repel our evil robot space-lords. And then there was a final showdown between our group’s hero and the head bad guy, and our hero killed the head bad guy... and then was somehow crowned the prophesized king of the robot space-lords and turned to evil. Which is when I woke up. How unreal, my brain is awesome. :D