Please caffeinate me

Tonight I want to go dancing; tart myself up, wear shoes so uncomfortable I'll long to take them off in a half hour and skid about in stockings. I want to just bounce about to music I hate in an anonymous crush of bodies. I'm not much for dancing but sometimes I want to give into a sense of wild abandon and be someone else, waiting for some old Offspring song to come on so I can scream along to the lyrics. I want to gulp down free water, forget I've got make-up on and rub mascara onto my knuckles, dodge groping hands and clumsy feet. I have clumsy feet but at least I keep my hands to myself. It's actually been over two years since I've hit a club. I don't really like them though apparently there's no smoking in Toronto anymore which would deal with my main complaint. Takes forever to wash cigarettes out my hair. Two shampoos, tonnes of conditioner. So, anyway, I'm feeling wild tonight, (dancing is about as wild as I can manage), but there's nothing to do. I'll have to satisfy myself with a murder mystery I guess.

Hoikety Choik!

I've been playing with the new camera and I took a few pictures of St. Mike's when I was downtown. I'm feeling all technologically competent which is totally unjustified considering that most 10 year olds can also use a digital camera and post pictures online. Still, I'm excited. I should get Photoshop now so I can fiddle with things. I used to be pretty good with it back in high school when I used it for the yearbook and newspaper but that was version whatever was around in 2000. I'm guessing it's changed since then.



Having an awful time doing the layout on here though.

Pithy

So, I used that pointy thing I drive into frogs' brains (in order to kill them) to puncture a hole in a bottle of fish sauce. It wouldn't screw off and I couldn't cut through it with a knife so I gave up and just stabbed the little nubbin. No worries, I thoroughly sterilize my dissection kit after doing anything icky with its contents; after all, I know perfectly well what kind of stuff I've gotten on it and have no desire to infect myself or others with blood flukes or other unpleasant organisms.

I'm oddly attached to my dissection kit. It's just so... handy. My TA in the last lab course I took was a bit weirded out when I pulled out my own gadgets one day but really, I had no choice!! In a supposedly world class institute of learning, I've had to deal with a lot of crappy equipment while acquiring my degree.

In my profile I say I'm a former student. I guess really I should say I'm unemployed. Truth is, almost 3 months since I took my last course, I still define myself as a student. It was bad enough that I did that before I graduated, (I mean there should be more to my identity than that shouldn't there?) but it's just sad now. I have to somehow cobble together a sense of self outside of school. There is more to me, isn't there? Yet I feel like there isn't.

I feel like my relationships with my friends are ephemeral, temporary. For one thing, I've lost touch with all my high school friends and recent attempts to contact them again have born no fruit which makes me think they've moved on with their lives. The second thing is that with my crazy curfew (7 pm unless I have permission) and not being allowed to go out on week-ends nine times out of ten, it's just getting difficult to see some of my friends.

Then there's my relationship with my family which is, more often than not, highly strained. I mean my immediate family here, since I have very little extended family in Canada. There's also the circle of my parents' friends and their kids who I have to socialise with and do so extensively. Except that feels so artificial since I've adopted a rather air-headed persona in order to fit in and please my mother. Occasionally I let some sarcasm seep through and then I get the weird looks.

Well, hopefully I'll get a job soon. Then I'll have something new to define myself by.

Helminthic

I've been quite depressed lately; only getting out of bed because I had no choice in the matter. I'd do what housework I had to then watch t.v just to pass the time or reread books because they were comforting. I have a stack of postcards from a friend of mine who moved away that I haven't read yet and emails I haven't replied to dating back weeks. Still, I think I've finally snapped out of it. I feel human again and it's time to take control of my life. Well, at least a little bit of control. I've decided to look for jobs and volunteer placements, maybe take a course or something.

I've ordered a tonne of books from the library; familiar authors but books I haven't read. I like reading books by authors I'm used to; no matter how easy the writing style, I find it's always slower going the first time I read something by a writer. After that it doesn't matter how sticky or cluttered or complicated the style, it feels comfortable. So I've got myself a stack of Agatha Christies, some William Gibson and the new P.D James coming. Hopefully most of them will be ready for pick up by Saturday. I am planning to reread Guy Gavrial Kay's "The Summer Tree" though. It'll probably make me a bit sad, I remember the start of the book is set in con hall. Even when I read it in high school I'd been in con hall once for a day of lectures by Nobel Laureates and was able to picture the setting quite vividly. There was this evil creature crawling on the glass of the dome in the story which no one noticed but when I read it I thought, "I would have seen it!" I spent most of those lectures staring up at the dome since it was in the days before I started wearing specs. I miss school and I miss being on campus. Most of it was just so beautiful. My mother got a digital camera so I can finally take pictures of all the trees and buildings and ivy I want. Next week I'm going to photograph everything until my fingers get numb with cold.

Half a score

Do you remember that little segment they'd do on sesame Street (I'm fairly sure it was Sesame Street though I guess there's a chance it was The Electric Company) with the ball and the numbers, where it would keep going and they'd sing the numbers? One, two three Four Five, six seven, eight Nine, Ten, eleven tweeeeelve, eeelve, TWELVE! It doesn't really work as a description unless I'm actually singing it. I used to love that. They'd do it for different numbers, never higher than twelve (which was my favourite since it was the highest). Ahh good times. I watched Sesame Street until I was almost nine for no better reason than there wasn't much children's programming back then. When I moved to Canada, there was that monkey and bear who spoke French. That was cool. I was thinking about that, (yes there was an instigator behind this rambling), because this is my tenth post and all I could think of when I realised that was teeeeeen eeeeen TEN. This is why I didn't get A's in university. My brain is full. It's all crammed up with bits from Sesame Street and the plots from all the sci-fi I read. Perfectly good space being taken up by fake-science instead of homework-science.

I started writing in here knowing my readership of two. Still, I tried to pretend they didn't exist because if I didn't I'd have to write for them, wouldn't I? I mean, it would only be polite to cater to my audience. This medium seems so strange and artificial. I'm not as candid and open as I could be because I know that other people could read it, (and at least one person has), and I don't exactly write for my readers even though I know who they are. See, I can't write whatever I want in case I get found out somehow. I know I could make this private, in fact I had a short lived private journal for a while, but knowing that people could read this, strangers as well as the terrific two, gives me a little incentive to update. So whatever. I write as though I'm writing to the world, as though I'm writing for myself and as though I'm writing for aunties who are eaves-dropping through an open window. It's weird but hey, I never did hit ten posts with my private online journal so I guess I'll see how long this lasts. I'm fickle though so I can't say as I expect much.

Oh, before I got distracted, I was going to write about dehydration. I'm very thirsty right now but I don't think I'll actually do something about it. Yes, I am weird.

Happy happy, joy joy

I've never taken anti-depressants. I don't know if I need them, the only therapist I went to was some holistic person who was into crystals and stuff. The only person I know who took some didn't like them and stopped taking them cold-turkey. I admit, the thought of being able to just take something and be all better is alluring. Of course, I'm not that naive; I know there's no such thing as a magic pill, that everything can't be fixed with a wave of the hand and that even if an anti-depressants fixed some of it, that they'd do so at a price. Nonetheless, when the depression is at its worst and it feels like it will never stop, I'd welcome ANYTHING to make it all go away.

As for getting help, well, when I'm not depressed I convince myself that I'm blowing the memory out of proportion and that anyway, it will never happen again. When I'm depressed, I'm in no condition to do anything, sometimes I'd just go to school, find a sofa and cry for hours instead of studying. So, yes, basically I find myself stuck in a rut and now that I'm out of school, I don't have the privacy for crying or the opportunity to see someone if I wanted to.

Moo or something unlike it

I'm depressed right now. For some reason I thought investigating camel cheese might cheer me up and oddly enough, it did so I'm actually much less depressed than I was. I was just wondering if people did make cheese from camel's milk, remembering an incident when I was about four noticed the milk bubbling over the mug in the microwave. It freaked me out, it looked so creepy. I asked what was wrong with the milk and was told that that was due it its being camel's milk, that was just what camel's milk did (it wasn't actually camel's milk). It's strange how things suddenly surface in one's mind. So I googled camel cheese and it turns out that the production of the stuff is a very recent thing, calf rennet being unable to coagulate the milk due to the composition of the fat chains etc. There's a vegetable rennet they're trying out in Mauritania that seems to work though the texture of the resultant cheese is a bit off. And reading all this stuff cheered me up. I think I miss learning. I should pick up some non-fiction or maybe even go through my text books. I guess that was the dullest post ever but I'm sure you're glad to know that there's now camel's milk cheese in the world

Suckiness

I have so much work to do so instead of doing it I'm chatting on MSN. My cake turned out horribly and I'm all depressed. I'm sleep deprived. First that makes me hyper and fun, then I get cranky. I'm cranky now and even all the army of the undead and paralyzing powers of eco conversation isn't managing to cheer me up. Super crappy pseudo-post for a super crappy pseudo productive day. I mean I made something, it just sucks.