Work angst

How is it possible that some of these things have been sitting on my desk since JULY? Why haven't they just disintegrated? Doesn't work BIODEGRADE?

This morning we found a book-mystery. Someone returned the cover for TRACK OF THE GRIZZLY, the 1979 classic by bear expert FRANK C CRAIGHEAD JR., complete with barcodes, etc., but containing the actual book THE DA VINCI CODE, which apparently happened to be the same size.

BUT WHY?

faux-deep thought, driving home from downtown

Where does Staples buy the copy paper they use in their print centre?

2 questions

1. I bought new glasses last week, and if I'm not mistaken they told me i was paying extra to have the lenses Scotchguarded. 1a. Did the person who invented this process, or at least this term, become a millionaire? 1b. If we Scotchguarded the whole world, would all spilled liquids hover uncertainly, half an inch above the ground?

2. Who thought of the idea of selling delivered pizzas with dipping sauces? This idea is so great and yet so bad for you. The dips are like little packets of heart attack. But at the same time, I sort of admire that mentality. Like, how do we incorporate more cheeze in pizza? (failed answers: make crust out of cheese, make all other toppings out of cheese, make the box out of cheese so people can eat the box after they've eaten the pizza)

Work mysteries

1. Why is there a plastic magazine file labelled "Municipal World" full of paperwork on my desk?

2. Why haven't I received any email since last Friday?

Why do 3 other people besides me have my books i'd like to read list bookmarked?

2 mysteries of the human condition

I. Ever since I began my grocery-buying career, I can't get over the fact that pretty much all kinds of juice cost the same. It doesn't matter how delicious the juice is: 2 litres of my favourite juice (cranberry-grape) costs the same as 2L of apple juice. It also doesn't matter how hard the juice was to make: I mean, you can buy these 1L containers of raspberry juice at superstore that are so sweet and thick, you have to mix them with sprite or vodka to make them drinkable. They are like the juiciest juice EVER. And raspberries are tiny--it must take so many of them to make one litre of juice! And yet they cost $1.79, the same as 1L of orange juice. It's crazy. This whole juice issue brings to my attention the fact that there is a whole world of food production beyond the ken of my experience, and that what goes on in that world can't be explained by conventional reasoning. When we go to the grocery store, we are really just seeing the shadows play on the walls of our cave.

II. I was thinking last night about geometry sets. Remember in elementary school when the geometry set conflict inevitably arose during back-to-school shopping? Or was this only me? Basically, the conflict could be summed up thus: 1. The school/teacher expected me to come to school with the necessary geometry implements, usually just a compass and a protractor. 2. My parents wanted to spend as little money as possible, and reasonably assumed I could use the same compass and protractor as last year. III. I wanted a brand new geometry set, every single year, with the perfect components in their perfect case. The tiny pencil, the eraser, the ruler, the implement that looked like a compass only with two pokey ends instead of a pencil end and a pokey end. What was it even FOR??? Every year the parts I actually used got dingy, and the lid of the case got broken, and come late August, following the inevitable argument with my parents, not getting a new set could actually catapault me into despair. It was totally unreasonable, but I think it seemed like the new geometry set would represent everything new and exciting and promising about the new year. I wonder what the adult version of this feeling of longing would be.

Also, I have nothing else to say

What's the deal with Freaks and Geeks? It's a great show, which I would really like to buy, but I have NEVER seen it on sale for less than $50. For 18 episodes! Not even on eBay! We should use it as the standard for currency, that's how predictably priced it is. The "F&G standard" instead of the "gold standard."

Ponder

When I got to work, my desk was covered with dust. Is it actually Dec. 18, 2008?

scams that are not scams

OMG, so this is from the archives of Pamie.com and it's so funny I couldn't stop laughing: Mama Crazy.

I wrote my first book review for publication yesterday, and now I can't find the book I had to write it on. My first thought was that it vaporized the minute I submitted my review, like DRM-ware or something. The logical part of my brain knows this is not the case, that a physical book does not disappear from a physical apartment, but I still am having trouble mustering the energy to look for it when its disappearance could be so aptly and poetically explained.

Getting free books in exchange for writing 250-word reviews of them is the BEST SCAM EVER. And it's NOT EVEN A SCAM.

I'm home sick from work today, and I got two new X-Files discs in the mail as if Zip and Canada Post KNEW I would need them. I can hardly leave my couch, and I've been taking a steady stream of tylenol, vitamins, and zinc.

Did you know that from the time the first Poltergeist movie was released until the third one (six years), four cast members died? Apparently, lots of weird things happened while the movies were being filmed as well. This constitutes the Poltergeist Curse.

I guess today is Hallowe'en. I'm not dressing up, nor do I have anything to dress up for. Hawllowe'en does not interest me. I do kind of wish I had some of those tiny chocolate bars, though... and some skim milk.

A little Buddha, covered in hair

Why do the Tim Horton's bagels with cream cheese taste so much better than the Jocelyn's Apartment bagels with cream cheese?

Thursday morning comin' down

I don't really understand why vegans don't wear wool. I mean, you don't kill the sheep to get the wool. In fact, sheep that haven't been sheared in a long time get to be so covered in the stuff, it obscures their peripheral vision--which actually makes them MORE susceptible to tiger attacks. If I were a sheep, I would happy to contribute such a warm, flexible, and useful fiber to the betterment of humanity. Also I would make jokes about it. "Oh, do you find my wool ewe-sful? You need it baaaaaadly!" And so on. I guess we've just figured out why I am not a vegan--it's because I find it all too easy to see things from the sheep's perspective. That, and I love eating meat.

Also, it's not like if the animals ruled the earth, they would stop eating us. They wouldn't. I'm sorry, but that is the reality. Have these people even seen Congo?

The internets (that's "internets," not "internet's," don't get confused) response to the Miss South Carolina video I posted a link to earlier has been swift and cruel. One bright spot in the sea of mockery is Maps for Us, which is attempting to use the power of the digital Internets to make up for the lack of maps in American schools. Like Miss South Carolina, I also "believe our education, should help the US, should help the south africa, and the iraq, and the asian countries, so we can build up our future." It's a beautiful notion.

My favourite is the map of South/Central America made from dirty laundry:

This is going to directly benefit the U.S. Americans.

I did not get any jobs. I am disappointed, discouraged, and also a little relieved that I don't have to work next week. I'm going to sew--brace yourself for pictures of more crazy projects. If I can sew my own clothes, and grow herbs on my balcony, maybe I'll save so much money, I won't even need a job!

He = Douglas Coupland, not James

When James and I saw the film version of Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada, he talked about this greeting which the government tried to get everyone to use in the 1970s, which I think was an Inuit word or something. Like all government-sponsored cultural initiatives (except the CBC?), it was a miserable failure. Anyone? Anyone? I want to find out what this word is, and start USING IT ALL THE TIME.

Ha! Using my mad librarian skills, I found it before I even had time to post this entry. It's "Chimo," which this handy website notes "may be accompanied by a gesture of salutation as well, namely moving the left hand in a circle on the area of the chest over the heart." I like the sound of that. Wikipedia adds, "In 1967, the Government of Canada attempted unsuccessfully to make "Chimo" the national greeting of Canada, akin to "Ciao" in Italy. This was the year of the Canadian Centennial, and the Canadian government was eager to establish a unique national culture. The phrase never caught on."

UNTIL NOW!

Chimo, Internets. Laters.

James and I saw The Bourne Ultimatum on Saturday, and I have one question: Did Motorola pay to have the V3 Razr product-placed as the chosen mobile technology of assassins everywhere? I mean, can you HAVE detrimental product placement? At least my phone is pink, not grey or black, so maybe I have a slender hope of NOT being a soulless, anti-social psychopath.

Necessitating emergency lunchtime bandage purchases

Pretty shoes lie. They look at you, all cute and pretty, with their little flower-shaped cutouts and their clunky soles, and they bat their metaphorical shoe-eyelashes. Then you buy them and wear them to work and in the time it takes to walk two blocks to the LRT station, they've worn several layers of skin off in an area the size of a quarter. Why are the prettiest shoes always the cruelest?

Also, since this post is already labeled "mysteries," a little taste of my work-life: How, how, HOW do you convert MARC records into Dublin Core so they can be imported into DSPace? HOW? (If you want to know what all that means, just ask Wikipedia, 'cause I got no patience for your ignorance, internets.)

Also proponents of the Guns for Brains program.

The Zombie Food Pyramid.
From The Futility Closet: an optical illusion.

Another one of those weekends which seemed barely weekendy, at all. I woke up this morning feeling oddly disoriented and hungry from having tossed and turned all night. (Note: Why the cliche "tossed and turned"? It's not a particularly good description of bad sleeping, although it does have alliteration. I should say I rolled and woke up, intermittently.) I hate those nights were time seems interminable, incomprehensible, and you wake up feeling like you've lived an extra year during the night.

I did get to see the Transformers movie, so I guess not the whole weekend was lost. The movie was kind of good, by the way. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. There is something inherently hilarious about trucks and cars that turn into giant, fighting robots--especially since the robots seem to contain a huge amount of metal, more than would fit in the cars and trucks. It's a mystery of mass, and filmmaking. Perhaps this is only funny because Transformers were not a part of my childhood, so I am a latecomer to their innate meanings and metaphors. Also, why do the Decepticons get to transform into much tougher, more useful vehicles than the Autobots, like tanks and fighter planes? That hardly seems fair. [James and I had a discussion about the idea of "transforming," and whether the Transformers' natural state is actually robot or vehicle. We decided that since, on their home planet, they presumably remain in robot form, they must be said to transform into vehicles, even though this may seem counter-intuitive within our human paradigm.]

I am taking a summer term class that starts tonight, the last of my degree. I am still working full-time, although "working" is not always the most accurate description of what I do while at work. I think the next six weeks are going to be exhausting, Internet. This morning, writ large. I may later wax philosophical about the last class of my graduate degree, but I already wrote a paragraph about Transformers that contained the phrase "counter-intuitive within our human paradigm," so I think I'm all pretentioused up for today.

Sometimes I get the feeling Facebook is surreptitiously using me for market research.

I tried to make a title for this post, but Blogger won't let me. So I shall informally name it, Untitled No. 2: A Sonata in B-.

died from being boring

Did you leave a brown 70s-style polyester jacket at my house? I was cleaning out my closet (like Eminem... It's a metaphor, but that actually happened) and I found it. I swear I've never seen it before, except it seems like something I would buy from the thrift store. Anyone? Anyone?

How the bottles get broken

A nostalgaic version of Oregon Trail that uses a firefox plug-in to play in your browser. Pretty hot. YOUR WHOLE PARTY HAS DIED OF DYSENTRY, dumbass!
The Great Canadian Wishlist is a CBC initiative (on Facebook! Weird), asking Canadians to vote for their most important wishes for the country. The pro-life and pro-choice wishes are neck and neck, since that's apparently the only political issue we can get out of our desk chairs for.

My neighbourhood is full of broken glass, and I always wonder where it comes from (as I cautiously cut a wide swath around it in my flipflops). Last night I solved the mystery. At around three in the morning, aimless youth have bottle fights in front of the convenience store, and throw bottles at each other. They insult each other in inordinately loud voices, and wake me up. The bottles shatter, and little bits of glass enter their skulls, impeding their brain activity and thus making it even more likely that in the future they will throw bottles at each other.

Ghah, I'm so sleepy today. I can only conclude that work makes me exhausted, and I am not cut out for it. I want a trust fund, NOW!

Whenever I am out and about on a weekday, during the day, I always ponder: WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT WORKING? I know why I'm not, but why aren't they? It turns out some preliminary "research" has been done into this subject. The San Francisco Gate has an article entitled The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren't you working? This has also been the subject of a This American Life episode, Secret Life of Daytime. The findings, roughly summarized: most of these people are "writing" something. Sort of like me, except in coffee houses instead of a little half-cubicle at the end of a hallway. (I stole all those links from kottke.org.)

My other recent internet find is this Wikipedia article on the Voynich Manuscript, which is fascinating. Things like this make my almost-librarian heart go pitter patter.