and no more posts about number of followers. too meta.

I am really, really enjoying the twitterfeed of the personal ads in the London Review of Books:

LRB Personals (LRBpersonals) on Twitter via kwout

This is what twitter should be used for. Only this.

It is only 1:12, and already 3 kinds of chocolates and a rose have been deposited on my desk! This is the best VD ever! (The rose is propped up very attractively in my Nalgene water bottle. It looks SO ELEGANT.) I will, on principle, eat any chocolate left on my desk. That's my guarantee. Let it never be said that I lack principles.

Tonight I am going for dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant with the man I love... and my dad, and my sister. Who I also love. So really, what could be better than that? TRUE LOVE AND GARLIC TOAST!

My dumb dead plant, TBA, has been confiscated from me and given to one of the receptionists for resuscitation/palliative care. Apparently she has a way with plants. I have a way with nothing.

Also I printed a "NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE" decal from the red dot campaign which I am going to affix to the inside of my mailbox. Unaddressed advertising mail is for CHUMPS and TREE-KILLERS. I didn't know this, but you can opt out of receiving it and Canada Post will honour your request! Hot!

I am done all my work, and I face the challenge of filling the next 3 hours with something semi-meaningful, so that I don't get really depressed, without spending any money online. I don't think it can be done.

From Wired, a crazy story about love, murder, obsession, and the military-- on the Internet.

Three recent but otherwise unrelated things I am feeling great about at this moment

i. self-possession Last night I was coming up the driveway to my building after walking to my sister's for dinner (and Bring It On) and this weird guy started talking to me. I know I've written before about how uncomfortable these awkward hitting-on situations make me, and how badly I traditionally handle them. And I was listening to my iPod, so the first assessment is always, Do I take my headphones off for this person? I unwisely chose to, and I got this:

Guy: Hey, do I know you? I thought I recognized you from somewhere.
Jocelyn: No, I don't think so.
Guy: Hey, do you live around here? I thought I knew you. Can I ask you your name?
Jocelyn: No.

And then I took out my keys, and I went into my building, and I pulled the door shut after me, and he wandered off. It was AWESOME. I might have been kind of mean, except I didn't feel guilty; I felt assertive, like I had managed, for the first time in my life, to avoid being made uncomfortable by a weird guy.

ii. bus-adventure I had to get a Criminal Records Check done today before I can start my new job. In order to do this, I had to go to the RCMP headquarters, which is actually not that far from my house. So I rode a bus I had never ridden before, the 8, and I got there and saw a bunny in the parking lot, and then it turns out I have never been convicted of any crimes! Score!

The 8, this new bus I just discovered, actually goes all the way from Kingsway Mall to Mill Woods Town Centre, and if you are from Edmonton you know that that actually represents a great distance. Since I was already riding the bus to go home, I decided to just stay on it to go to Mill Woods. It was exciting, Internet! It turns out that it is actually a really long bus ride! In Mill Woods, I went to the fabric store, and then I came home. Altogether, it took 4 hours.

I told James about my trip and he emailed me back: "You're such an explorer." Like Coraline!

iii. unrestrained fangirl gushing I don't mind admitting to you, Internet, that I want to be Sarah Vowell when I grow up. Not only is she the author of several great books, but she is also on National Public Radio, AND she was interviewed in a documentary I saw about the band They Might be Giants, AND she wrote the forward to the book I have about bomb shelters (Waiting for the End of the World). Basically, she gets to do everything I want to do, to write about everything I want to write about, and also to be in animated movies that I am less than crazy about. And she apparently pals around with people like David Sedaris, Dave Eggers, and Nick Hornby.

Anyway, I am currently reading her book of essays The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and it's great. I'm not that interested in American politics, except in a sort of bewildered outsidery way, but Sarah Vowell makes me understand how smart Americans can still believe in their country. There is one essay in this book, "The Nerd Voice," which you absolutely, absolutely need to read, Internet. It manages to articulate something that I have never been able to state as clearly as she can, although I've pondered it many times: that George Bush somehow managed to become president instead of Al Gore, in spite of the fact that he is, clearly, a moron. (The reason I have always insisted on, which also accounts for the popularity of Ralph Klein here in Alberta, is this: people, illogically, DO NOT WANT A POLITICAL LEADER WHO IS SMARTER THAN THEM.) Not only that, but it also manages to explain what this fact has to do with Revenge of the Nerds, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Internet, and Abraham Lincoln paper dolls.

Love, and semantics

A word about words: I despise the term "significant other" and its flippant abbreviation, SO. It sounds so cold, and also not specific enough: I have lots of people who are significant to me, and what's "other"? Like "The Other"? It just sounds like meaningless lingo. I hate "Partner" almost as much. It sounds calculating, like you've considered your prospects, and your "partner" is the one you're investing in. I like its suggestion of equality, and also its gender-neutrality, but it's still too formal. I have generally referred to James as my "boyfriend," but as we get older I grow weary of that as well. It was fine when I was 18 and he was 22, but we're grown-ups now, and a boyfriend seems like something you have in high school. "Boyfriend" and "girlfriend" don't communicate the depth of our love for each other, not to mention our shared desire to get a puppy.

What I dislike about these phrases is their coldness, their wide use, how impersonal they are. Therefore, I am experimenting with some alternatives. My favourite, by far, is "man friend," because it sounds to me like something divorcees on cruises would have. Recently a friend suggested "Lover" (pronounced "Lovah"), which is good too, plus it tends to make people uncomfortable. "Gentleman caller," with its fake modesty and its Tennessee-Williams-ishness, is good in small doses. My trusty Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (given to me by the variously described man in question) suggests, also, sweetheart (nice and retro), escort (fun sexual connotations), companion (overtures of Lord of the Rings!), (main) squeeze, steady, swain, and beau. And those are just the good ones. Perhaps I'll alternate between these for awhile, try them on for size.

Interesting: each of these words means something very specific to me, has a million connotations, precious to a native speaker of English. When I took Spanish, we learned one word for "boyfriend," novio. Is that closer to "swain" or closer to "lovah"? I have no way of knowing. In French, the high-school appropriate term was Petit ami (little friend), which I always found deeply weird. My main squeeze is actually larger than most of my other friends. This is the risk of second languages, that they may never mean as much, or vary in such specific ways.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in English, and of the process, he writes (in one of my favourite passages of the afterword to that book):

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

Nabokov is the only one who understands my boyfriend problem, or I should say, my "boyfriend" problem.

Fraggle Rock knows all.

"Wembley, first of all, you're not a little wimp. Secondly, what does a little wimp like you want with romance?" -Gobo Fraggle

Conan: "I am listening to you, and I am nodding."

Conan interviews "Mystery," that guy who claims to be an expert in seduction. Although I'm not convinced that seduction is actually the explanation for Mystery's success. Maybe women are thinking, "if I sleep with this guy, will he leave me alone?"

Sunday mornin' comin' down

I made these human eyeball pincushions last night, using this flickr tutorial. (There are also some for sale in the Etsy store of the woman who made the tutorial.) It was very easy, and I like how disgusting they look. I even learned a new embroidery stitch for this project, so I would say I've accomplished everything I need to for the weekend. (Plus, I found a way to recycle those plastic 2L pop bottle caps, which are a key structural element!) Everything I do today is just gravy. And I may make actual gravy.

I made a Facebook album of my various craft projects. I know, how self-aggrandizing of me.

(Whoa... in the USA, what size are the big bottles of pop ["soda"]? 2 litres is such an ideal size! I know we have more in common that what divides us [awwww....] but sometimes I am just so disoriented by the idea of living in a world where things are measured differently. Also, I have decided to start refering to the United States as the "USA," or better yet the "US of A," because I think it has a retro, old-timey feel. Anyway...)

Otherwise, though, the weekend has been a bit of a bust so far as I felt bizarrely, unpleasantly ill yesterday due to what was likely one or more of the following illnesses:

• Toxic Shock Syndrome [I regularly become convinced that I have this, in spite of its extreme rarity]
• Sunstroke [Even though I was very sick before I ever went out in the sun]
• Air conditioning malaise [because the air that is breathed into my apartment by the air conditioning system smells and tastes funny]
• hunger [on weekends, I sometimes become so lazy about food that I basically don't eat any of it, and my body rapidly progresses past hunger to a headachey, nauseated, muscle-achey state. Since I do not diagnose this state as hunger, I conclude that eating won't help, and I get sicker. This happens a surprising amount, and yet I just don't learn. I am like a baby bird that cannot care for itself.]
• the flu [when I have flu-like symptoms, generally I only consider a flu diagnosis as a last resort.]

So I spent most of the day indoors, watching Lost (and singing the theme song), and when I ran out of episodes, James drove me to not one but two movie stores to get more.

I am actually being serious here when I say that true love is driving someone around on a Saturday afternoon to rent them more DVDs, because they are feeling sick and sad. Not to mention driving them to Wal-Mart so they can buy felt and embroidery floss to make pincushions shaped like human eyeballs. I have the best boyfriend in the world, internets. Our six-year anniversary is coming up at the end of this month--I may have to write a commemorative poem or something. (I mean, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to date 18-year-old me, so I would say James really took one for the team there.) And despite the impression this website may give, I actually love other things about him besides the fact that he drives me around. I can list some of these other things in the poem, maybe.

I gotta bounce.

Razr and iPod: A Love Story

To answer the unspoken question: yes, I do find myself endlessly amusing. Please notice the soft lighting.

adventures in public romance (not the sexy kind--this site is always SFW!)

I just dextrously avoided being asked out by someone at the library help desk--I say dextrously because I employed the classic, "Well, this is a helpdesk, so... if you have an actual question, i will answer it" line (implication: but I do not want to be part of any "confidential conversations," thanks). I don't mind being flirted with, if it's classy flirting--especially since I am feeling rather pretty today--but this wasn't flirting, it was something else far more open and depressing... scouting. Frank evaluation. Predation.

The weird people who try to date me--and there aren't that many, but enough to establish a pattern--are always asking me my name, and I experience this momentary hesitation. Why don't I want them to know my name? If normal crazy people want to know my name, I usually don't mind (it's not like it's a secret), but for some reason if I can tell they're angling to try to ask me out (or whatever we would do, in their crazy version of what relationships are like--make out in the bathroom?) it makes me uncomfortable. It seems like I'm giving them a power they don't deserve. Fairy tales know this: names are powerful. Yet I always stumble over the truth instead of providing a spontaneous, ill-constructed lie. Why can't I be Monique or Sasha or Jamie, just for today? Maybe I should practice.

Another weird guy asked me out earlier in the week, as I was walking from the LRT station to my building, and this guy was OLD. Sometimes I describe people as "old," and I really mean, "over 30," but this guy was 65 if he was a day. I transcribe our conversation for posterity:

OLD guy, with no preamble: Are you single?
Jocelyn, quizzical and amused expression on her face: No.
Old guy: Because you are [indistinct; a combination of an appreciative groan and what may have actually been a real english word, although maybe not].
I walked away, laughing, and when I had gone another ten feet:
Woman sitting on a bench with a bemused look on her face: You're not single either, huh?
Jocelyn: No, not today.

Am I a weird guy magnet? Or is it just logical--only weird guys would try to pick up random women on the street, and therefore, the only men who will try to pick you up on the street are weird by definition? I hope it's the second. Anyway, I wanted to ask this weird guy what, in his weird old guy version of reality, gave him the impression that he had a chance--however remote--of picking me up. I wanted to say, "do I look homeless or mentally ill to you? Do I look like I am in your age or income or attractiveness bracket?" [not that i'm a supermodel, but keep in mind, this guy was getting the senior's discount AND the weird guy discount, and probably a shoplifting-from-value-village discount as well. At least I wear clean clothes and my hair smells like satsuma.] "Do you know that I have a real boyfriend, who is gainfully employed and cute and smart and funny and who accompanies me to foreign films and never describes me using grunting noises? Do you know that I have 15/16ths of a Masters degree, a laundry card, a savings account, multiple pairs of shoes, 471 books, tiny frozen casseroles, handmade jewelry, a sense of dignity, and a myriad of other things that put me way out of your league?"

But I said none of those things. At least I didn't tell him my name.