bus haiku

all these billboards for
american apparel
fill me with despair

3 more books, 1 more haiku

I'm on holidays. My book-reading project continues.

Monday - Overqualified by Joey Comeau. Comeau is the co-author of the webcomic A Softer World. And (as we Canadians love to write) he's Canadian! I was actually looking for his new book, One Bloody Thing After Another, but the Chapters website lied when it said it was in stock. But it's for the best, because I learned that One Bloody Thing is about zombies (or something?!?), which I am tired of; whereas Overqualified is about grief and ridiculous letters, which I NEVER grow tired of. This is a really funny book, and it's a bit sad in places, and it's nice and short. And he's Canadian.

Tuesday - Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin. This review from Bookslut sums up my feelings about this book pretty succinctly. Especially this part: "Even in this short and spare work, it is fatiguing to read the commoditized so-called underground undeservedly claiming elevation over mainstream consumer and work choices." This puts it more articulately than I ever could. It's short too, but if you're only going to read one of these two short, at-times-uncomfortable books, make it the first one. All the yuppy vegan food and meaninglessness in this one are exhausting.

Wednesday - Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr. I don't know why this book has taken me so long to finish (All Consuming says: 14 weeks. Thanks, online chronicle of my failure!). It's not that it's not good, otherwise I would have given up on it long ago; it's something else. It's just not the book for me. I think I've grown weary of beautiful, sparkling, supernatural boys. Their sparkliness gives me migraines.

sure i've read these books
but i've watched some tv too
like jurassic park

So, I'm on holidays this week, and I'm trying to finish a book a day. I don't expect to achieve this goal, because this is not one of those blogs where I make some kind of outrageous commitment to do something for a set period of time, then actually FOLLOW THROUGH, and blog about it in a consistently amusing yet thought-provoking way. This is the kind of blog where I write dumb haikus. [Not every day, though. I mean, I have other stuff to do.]

So anyway, here is what I've read so far:

Friday: Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island. I liked this book-- it was spooky. It was suspenseful enough that while I was reading it I just wanted to find out what was going to happen, but now that it's done, I kind of wish I had savoured it more. Sometimes if you finish a book too fast you get that feeling -- like when you try to keep walking down a set of stairs that ends one step earlier than you expected, and there's something kind of jarring about it, the too-hard step onto the floor. This is as close as I can come to expressing how I feel about this book ending. This is Goodman's first YA novel, but she has written books for adults, and my library has them (which is good, because I can't afford to go on holidays every week, obviously).

Saturday: Maureen Johnson's The Key To The Golden Firebird. I love Maureen Johnson's books more than a 27-year-old should, really. I was crying at the end, and not just because I was tired from finishing a book in one day. This sad to say, though: I kind of like her twitter more.

Today: Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Vol 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. It's awesome! It's as awesome as my comic-loving friends told me it would be! The only problem with this is that now I want to (a) read all the others and (b) go see the movie, but not before reading the other books, not all of which are out yet. Yeah. Problem! Oh yeah, I also kind of want to (c) be a really cool cartoon girl with a messenger bag and awesome hair.

I'm also reading bits and pieces of Wendell Berry's Bringing It To The Table, because it's long and I know I don't have a hope of actually finishing it all in one day. So he'll get a longer letter later, when I finish it. This is not cheating. This is being forward-thinking.

a book every day?
that seems pretty plausible
for a giant nerd

Heartbreak in 17 syllables.

A follow up to 2 haikus I wrote for my new travel mug.

i remember it
my stainless steel travel mug
in the good old days

i've searched everywhere
it's not in the lost and found
i might as well die.

2 haikus I wrote for my new travel mug

eco travel mug
mountain equipment co-op
lovely stainless steel

no more garbaged cups
your reusable glory
baristas hate me

Where are the facebooks of yesteryear?

lost without facebook.
even a haiku won't help.
nothing is working.

space heater haiku

oh, my space heater
heating all of outer space
would not be too hard

work fridge haiku series

san pellegrino
stolen food, we're watching you
i wish you were mine

consider myself
a woman of principle
except days like this

(When I worked at the public library, all the work fridges had signs that said: "STOLEN FOOD - We're watching you." I always thought that was weird. I mean, it's not the food's fault it's being stolen. They should be watching the FOOD-STEALERS. Unless it's talking Muppet food: "Help! Help! I'm being stolen!" It also seemed like kind of an empty threat. I mean, if someone were really watching the stolen food, then it wouldn't be stolen any more would it?)

3:34 pm haiku

it's freezing at work
i'm wearing my arm-warmers
but it doesn't help

here we go again

records management
is such a gloomy prospect
make me a cocktail!

on tuesday evening
a little drunk and sloppy
and still not on task

----------------
Currently listening to: Nada Surf - Mother's Day
via FoxyTunes

twitter? more like fritter. ing. away time.

twitterku compiles haiku poems from the twitter public stream. I like: "spining on my chair/MIssing someone. Or am I?/still hating twitter" and also: "Picking up my kids.../drinking an orange fanta/I got my griffin"

I joined twitter but I don't really see the point of it. What do I care what other people are doing? It's all about me, me, me! Plus the last thing I need in my life is one more social networking site to check obsessively.

Dispatches from my internet travels

i. A surreal conversation between two chatbots.

Jabberwocky: Would you like to hear a joke?
Alice: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.
J: I think you lie a lot.

ii. An interesting response to Oprah's involvement with the self-help craze The Secret. (See previous post: Oprah's ugly secret.) "we are individually, institutionally, and societally hellbent on wishful thinking. The Secret tells us to visualize best-case scenarios and banish negative ones from our minds. Never Saw It Coming says that's what we've been doing all along—and we get blindsided by even the most foreseeable disasters because of it." Fighting self-help with science!

iii. Flatland: In this "semi-extreme performance" (?), some people lived in this bizarre plastic ant-farm house for almost three weeks. "That's crazy." "No, that's art." They even wore jumpsuits, which, as we all know, is the ultimate in team-building. (Unfortunately, their website is a usability nightmare. Memo to artists: no matter how brilliant you are, your readers still have to be able to navigate.) I've always been a fan of small, enclosed spaces, so to me this seems kind of fun. Although you could just get an RV.

iv. A photo essay: things I did while waiting on hold for Sprint customer care. Thanks to the miracle of mobile technology, we can be so efficient while we are on hold.

v. haiku:
loser with no job
i'm even tired of warcraft
bored during the day

Diegesis, vampires, and gummi bears

From the astonishing bowels of the interweb: a fairly pretty chandelier made of gummi bears. Gummi bears are a good choice for lighting because they are sort of luminescent. On the other hand, you could just eat them, because they are luminescently delicious.

Yesterday James pointed me in the direction of some interesting theoretical math related to the vampire population in Buffy. However, this whole supposition is based on the idea that every time a vampire kills a human, that human then becomes a vampire, which (at least within the diegesis of the show) is patently false, as established in the first episode. "To make you a vampire they have to suck your blood. And then you have to suck their blood. It's like a whole big sucking thing. Mostly, they're just gonna kill you." I am linking to this article nonetheless, because I admire the amount of time and abstract thought that went in to it, but i think it constitutes a fairly radical interpretation of the text.

[Edited March 17 @ 11:11 AM to add: James: "I think the problem is that they have applied the zombie model to vampires." Jocelyn: "Exactly."]

weekend haiku
making scrambled eggs
and law and order c.i.
doth a weekend make.

Jocelyn wakes up, and wants to make out with Saturday.

I am going to get to level 60 in warcraft this weekend. Today, even. Let it never be said that I don't set goals.

Something funny: Haiku Error messages.

Something else funny: The funniest, and crudest, blog entry I have read in awhile. [From The Erin O'Brien Owner's Manual for Human Beings]

Something less funny: Who wants to save the aye-aye? [Speciesism is a serioius matter. We have a zero tolerance policy here at deletia hq.]

Last week I spontaneously declared it Dress Like Your South Park Character Day. I tagged Matt and James as the next participants. Thanks to them for being such good sports.

A haiku series inspired by the tantalizing closeness of reading week.

the library's halls
gently suffused with the smell
of fresh, hot french fries.

warcraft will take up
as much time as you can give
so effortlessly.

it's an albatross
discouraging and endless
but homework persists.