welcome to downtown coolsville

Spent the last night of 2009 in a happy haze of beer, pot, and gingerbread with some delightful people. And got a call from a very certain girl at the stroke of midnight.

2010, you are off to a good start.

( Time for that meme I post every year. )

When my little sister heard about the upcoming FOBlink-182 tourvaganza, she got very big-eyed and said:

"I want to go to that concert. More than anything in the world."

"Huh," I said, intrigued. "Do you want it even more than, say, world peace?"

She nodded solemnly.

"You do know that makes you a bad person, right?" I asked.

"No!" she replied, shaking her head. "Because that concert will make world peace happen."

I love you, Little Sister.

Guyssssss it was so WARM today! So warm there were kids out playing on the street all day! So warm I got to lie out on my back deck and absorb the sunshine like a furry purry kitty! So warm I didn't even put on socks! (I pretty much always wear socks- brightly-patterned knee socks, for preference- so this is a big deal.) I've got my window wide open and I can hear frogs somewhere out there and it is SUMMER FUCK YEAH FINALLY. \o/

I mean, it snowed again a few days ago, but whatever. SUMMER.

I have been feeling kind of ridiculously optimistic about things lately. This is partially due to FUCK YEAH SUMMER, but also because I have decided to spend this summer Being Productive, and so far I'm doing pretty well! I've been writing and practicing bass and working like a motherfucker and it feels really good to be busy because I think I've been kind of doing nothing for a while. Even during the school year.

I've also been reading a lot, which I choose to count as Being Productive because, um, reading is good for the brainmeats? I dunno. Here are some of the books I've read, complete with pocket-sized reviews!

( Books, books, books. )

I'm currently reading Out by Natsuo Kirino (delightfully creepy and full of social commentary) and The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir (interesting, but it's really easy to tell she usually writes nonfiction- her style is kind of clumsy and she can never seem to decide whose head she wants to be in). Books are fab.

On the last day of 2008 I went for a drive with my sister and my father. She had a camera, I had a pen, and he had the wheel of the car.

It was a snowy day. We slipped when we walked.

There's a place called Cape Spear where you can stand on the rocks and look out across the ocean and see England if you squint. There was a high wind and spiders sleeping under the lighthouse, dreaming of summer. The fog was too thick to see the gulls, but we could hear a helicopter miles out to sea. It was a lonely happy sort of place, the kind of place that makes you want to jump off the rocks and turn into a bird.

When we got back into the car we smelt like salt and pollen and lights at night.

I tried to capture the feel of it when I was choosing songs to drive to. I don't know how well I did, though.

U2- Running To Stand Still
Joel Plaskett- Love This Town
The Arcade Fire- Keep The Car Running
Basia Bulat- I Was A Daughter
De Capulet- The Paradigm
The Decemberists- Engine Driver
Wintersleep- Jaws Of Life
Stars- Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
The Killers- Read My Mind
Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Cheated Hearts
Death Cab For Cutie- The Sound Of Settling
Tracy Chapman- Fast Cars
The Used- On My Own
Leonard Cohen- Suzanne
The Sundays- Wild Horses
Wolf Parade- Shine A Light

Later that night Older Sister and I wandered into a sketchy bar with a man playing folk songs and "Drunk Girl" on the jukebox, where they gave us free champagne as the year changed.

Goodbye, 2008. I'm not gonna fucking miss you.

Some things that make me happy right now:

This brilliant insight in John Mayer's songwriting process. I've kind of hated John Mayer ever since that fucking "Daughters" song, but it turns out he's kind of funny! And self-deprecating! "If I can't get the girl why don't I just tell her I'm John Mayer?"

This All-American Rejects sea shanty cover of "Womanizer."

Sir Terrence of Pratchett. :}

The Making Of "America's Suitehearts." Cassadee continues to charm the bejeesus out of me.

iamsupernova's Suicide Girls picspam. (Not safe for work for reasons of boobies.)

The fact that baby platypi are called "puggles."

Also, I'm about forty pages into House of Leaves and I already want to write something just like it.

(Random question: Does anyone have any pictures of crows, especially sketches/cartoons/paintings/etc? My Google-fu is sadly lacking tonight.)

I started my bookstore job on Tuesday.

... Guys. GUYS. THERE ARE SO MANY BOOKS IN THE WORLD AND I GET TO CHILL WITH THEM AND GET PAID FOR IT. :DDDD

(Restocking the erotica section is a little weird, though. I never knew how many people wrote sexy books about vampires. And all the titles have words like "velvet" and "forbidden" and "desire" and "seduction" in them. If I wrote a book called Velvet Seduction, Forbidden Desire: The Sensual Adventures of Horatio Ravisham, Vampire Demon-Lover I would make a bundle. A bundle I would not be able to tell my mother about, but a bundle nonetheless.)

Continuing the theme of "Things That Make Ish Ridiculously Happy," Tom Lenk came out! Which means I have an excuse to post a video full of my favourite Andrew moments, which means everybody wins. (Especially Tom Lenk.)



And while I'm at it...



... it's almost Halloween!

(IT IS ALSO ALMOST MY BIRTHDAY. JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT.)

This morning I played around with eyeliner. ( I wanted to get that consumptive look. )

Whenever I list movies that make me cry I forget to put Pleasantville on there. It's Jeff Daniels' character that does me in- when he stares at the art book and says "where am I going to see colours like that?" (Little known fact: there is a town pretty close to St. John's that is named Pleasantville! It makes me laugh and laugh and then kind of want to take the bus there so I can hang out with Joan Allen.)

... This entry has no unifying theme. I mean, other than "DEAR INTERNETS: HERE ARE THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY. ALSO, IT'S MY BIRTHDAY SOON. ALSO, I'M A CAMWHORE."

Some of which are pretty bad, because Kidston's book collection, she is not so premium.

Brown Girl In The Ring, by Nalo Hopkins

Voodoo! Gods! Monsters! Zombies! A dystopian Toronto! Although I found the dialogue a little confusing, this book has pretty much everything a good urban fantasy should have. Plus zombies. Did I mention the zombies? And the mean old ladies with magical powers?* And the graphic death? And the feminism? And the cases of mistaken identity? AND THE ZOMBIES?

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

This is a book about racism disguised as a book about time travel. It is utterly amazing on both levels. Read it.

Adverbs, by Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler's taken a while to really hit his stride in adult literature, I think- Watch Your Mouth was disappointing, and I can't even remember The Basic Eight- but he finally has with Adverbs. Focusing on the intertwined love lives of a few dozens people- some of whom may or may not be one another- the novel moves back and forth in time, space, and tone. Handler's style is both snappily ironic and totally earnest, and Adverbs itself is equally divided: it is about how love fails everyone and about how it's the only really important thing in the world. (Also, I think uncommon_crow would really like it. Just throwin' that out there.)

The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint

An artist named Jilly is seriously injured in a car accident, which throws her into Mabon, a kind of fairyland she's been trying to break into for years. Trying to lose herself in dreams, she learns to come to terms with her abusive past, her guilt over abandoning her sister, and the possibility of paralysis leaving her unable to paint again. I'm still not sure how I felt about this book. On the one hand, Charles de Lint is a really lovely writer and incorporates the fantastic into the everyday in a seamless, understated way that makes me really jealous; on the other hand, I couldn't get into Jilly as a character. Or, rather, I couldn't get into how all the other characters reacted to Jilly. A protagonist being well-liked is something I can deal with- not everyone can be a twisted anti-hero, because that would be boring as fuck- but half the city (literally) showing up to visit her in the hospital? It got to the point where I groaned every time the point of view switched to anyone who wasn't Jilly or her sister, because it meant I was in for another digression on how Jilly is such an awesome person, like, really, she's so nice, want to hear about all these selfless things she did for the poor and the homeless and the orphans and the kittens and stuff? De Lint's treatment of sexual abuse kind of bothered me as well- although it was easy to tell he empathized with Jilly and wanted his readers to identify with her and her pain, there was an undercurrent of voyeurism there that made it a very discomforting read. It was a good read in spite of that, and I certainly wouldn't encourage anyone not to read it- de Lint writes some good, meaty fantasy and has the guts to tackle subjects a lot of genre writers don't really address, or use as a cheap plot device.

Affinity, by Sarah Waters

What I got out of this book: Don't be a lesbian in Victorian England, you will go crazy/become a criminal/go crazy and then become a criminal and then kill yourself because the woman you helped to bust out of jail was using you the whole time and you'll never love again, woe, woe, etc. Okay! Thanks for that, Ms. Waters!

Soul Kitchen, by Poppy Z. Brite

Ricky and G-man, the cooks who took the world by storm in Liquor, are back and planning to open a new franchise called Soul Kitchen, which serves comfort food from around the world. After hiring on a man wrongly accused of rape and murder twelve years before things get a little tense; that tension only heightens when you add in Rickey's burgeoning addiction to prescription drugs, G-man's struggle with infidelity, and roughly a thousand other narrative threads that Brite seems eager to drop as soon as she picks them up. Remember how I loved Liquor? That was because it had a clear, concise plot, well-defined characters, and a sense of humour about itself. Soul Kitchen has none of those; on top of that, it cannot decide what kind of book it wants to be. A murder mystery? A meditation on race relations in New Orleans? A moral lesson on Why Drugs Are Bad, Use Acupuncture? A straight-up restaurant book? It tries to be all of them at the same time, and ends up being nothing much at all. Also, Brite's history of failing at characters of colour continues: not only does the only prominent black character in the book die at the end, but a good portion of the book is spent criticizing this Crazy Angry Black Guy being mean to all the Nice White Folks Just Trying To Help Him Out. I mean, what's a dozen years of wrongful imprisonment when someone offers you a job in a kitchen, man?

The Holy, by Daniel Quinn

Oh, Daniel Quinn. Please stop trying to write books with plots and characters and dialogue (and, uh, Satanic rituals) and go back to your telepathic gorillas, please.

Stardust: The David Bowie Story, by Henry Edwards and Tony Zanetta

This book taught me that David Bowie was a cockhead. And slept with a lot of drag queens. V. informative! (Hilariously, since it was written in 1986 it ends by noting that hey, David Bowie is gonna be in this movie with muppets and stuff sometime soon, he'll be wearing tight pants, it'll be awesome! TRUER WORDS, MY FRIENDS, TRUER WORDS.)

Glass, by Ellen Hopkins

Oh, God.

Okay. Remember Go Ask Alice and how it was a straight-up hoax book that was written to scare youngsters onto the straight and narrow? Imagine if someone wrote that in the aughts, in the form of a frillion calligrams, and pretended it was their daughter's experiences instead of their own, and you've got Glass. DON'T DO DRUGS, NOT EVEN ONCE, BECAUSE YOU'LL BECOME HOPELESSLY ADDICTED AND SPEND ALL YOUR BIRTHDAY MONEY ON CRYSTAL METH. ALSO DO NOT HAVE SEX, BECAUSE THEN YOU WILL HAVE A BABY AND GET FAT AND THAT WILL SUCK PRETTY HARD, RIGHT? ALSO MEXICANS ARE DANGEROUS. ALSO WHAT DO LESBIANS DO IN BED, I MEAN SERIOUSLY? ALSO REALLY GUYS, DON'T DO DRUGS, YOU'LL GO TO JAIL FOREVER. OKAY? OKAY.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Dear Mr. Kay:

If you call a vagina a "portal," I am going to laugh at you.

Love and kisses,
Ish

The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom

Reading this book was like watching a movie- I enjoyed it, but I was still waiting for the credits to roll.

* Mean old ladies with magical powers make me happy. Just ask Granny Weatherwax.

A brief (considering) list of things that make me happy:

- Strawberry oil.
- My newly-discovered love for Cobra Starship.*
- The Importance of Being Earnest.**
- Striped shirts.
- The Juno version of "Anyone Else But You."
- Secretly listening to the Spice Girls.
- Talking about Victorian feminism with Dr. Grant (with bonus digressions about how much he loved 101 Dalmatians).
- My genderqueer skellington hoodie, as sort of seen here.***
- Three-in-the-morning conversations in our living room.
- Hot apple cider (with extra sugar and cinnamon).
- Frank Iero.

* I have decided that every time I am on a plane in the future, I am going to play "Snakes On A Plane" upon take-off. I have already done this once; it was fantabulous.

** In the quite unlikely event that I ever act again,**** it would be to play Algernon.

*** Okay, so it's mostly a picture of one of my cats, but he's a fuckin' adorable cat.

**** I was in The Wizard of Oz in grade four. After that I retired from the stage, aside from my dual role in twelfth grade's Who's Hamlet Again? My illustrious acting career, ladies, gents, and others.

Bad thing:

I am working with a dreadful person. Her name is Effie, and she's got soulless eyes, and may in fact be Satan himself. Last night she made me cry.

Good thing:

Last night, again, a woman came to the register with her daughter, maybe three or four years old. The mother ran to the back of the store to get something she'd forgotten. The little girl squinted at me over the counter, then pointed to the Archie comics.

"Are these joking books?" she asked me, in a very critical little-kid voice.

"Sort of," I replied.

She picked one up and looked at it consideringly. "Does it have rhymes?"

I'd read a lot of Archie comics as a kid, but couldn't remember any having rhymes. "I don't think so," I said. "Just pictures."

"And words," she pointed out triumphantly as she flipped it open, giving me one of those hard, disapproving looks that children give you when they think they've caught you in a lie. She jabbed at one of the speech bubbles, in which Reggie was telling the other Riverdale boys that he didn't blame them for making a move on his girl, as she was such a doll. Or maybe peach. "What does this say?" she asked.

We stood there for a few minutes, her finger moving from one bubble to another as I read to her, feeling slightly foolish, bits of dialogue put in the mouths of teenagers with seventies vocabularies and eighties wardrobes by old men who'd forgotten both of those decades, and she nodded, very seriously, filing it all away somewhere for reference.

Her mum came back to the counter, flustered, and apologized for holding up the line. She told the little girl to scan her candy- I think it was a pushpop- and then told her to thank the nice lady.

She said "'nk you," and then asked her mother if they could buy the comic, since it had jokes in it, and I wondered what she'd be like when she learned how to read.

I hope she'll find a really good book someday, one that smells like libraries do on rainy days, one with someone else's name scrawled in pencil on the inside cover. I hope she'll fall in love with it. I hope she'll curl up on a comfy chair and get lost and won't come when dinner's ready.

Every story brings the imagination and reality together in moments of what we might as well call faith. Stories give us a way to wonder how totalitarian states arise, or why cancer cells behave the way they do, or what causes people to live in the streets... and then come back again in a circle to the wonder of a song... or a supernova... or DNA. Wonder and wondering are closely related, and stories teach us that we cannot chose between them. If we try, we end up with the kind of amazement that is satisfied with the first explanation, or the kind of curiousity that is incapable of genuine surprise. Stories make the world more real, more rational, by bringing us closer to the irrational mystery at its centre. Why did my friend get sick and die? Why is there so much suffering in the world? Whose land is this we live on? How much is enough?

And where is home?

- If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, by J. Edward Chamberlin

Madeleine L'Engle died.

\D:/

Doggies.

There are few things more uncomfortable than having your little sister and her friend ask you interested questions about the mechanics of queer sex.

However, there are few things more satisfying than discussing the environment and politics with said little sister and friend, so I guess things balance out.

(Also, I now own this and this. And a pin that says "God is too big for one religion." It makes me sad that I always want to buy anti-capitalist buttons, though. Even if I pretended it was due to being fashionably ironic*, I'd die inside of shame.)

This week has been a little dramatic. I think the drama reached its high point tonight, when Mum discovered that my little sister's ex-best friend** posted pictures of her (the friend, not Little Sister) touching herself on the Internet. This is also the first year anniversary of Paula Gallant's murder at the local elementary.

Sometimes I wonder if this is why the suburbs are such a good place to raise your kids.

I've noticed since coming home that I feel less afraid about things. My family's noticed it, too- I'm talking more, being more social, not staring at my feet as I walk. Kerrin's theory is that since I've been amongst real strangers, socializing with people I don't know very well doesn't scare me as much anymore. My theory is that that last bout of exam panic sucked the fear clean out of me.

( Aaaaaand it's another end-of-the-year meme. )

I seem to be allergic to my house. *violent sneeze*

Sometimes I want to be a warm yellow light that shines over everyone. Sometimes I want to do nothing other than twirl around in a field full of buttercups and fluffy wee kittens. Sometimes I like to listen to songs about the moon.

But mostly I just want a cup of tea.

* Subject of future journal rant: how much I hate fashionable irony. Especially if it's a person's excuse for telling racist jokes.

** They're not friends anymore because Friend- who has been consistently racist, homophobic, and destructive, so I'm not too torn up about the friend breakup- set Little Sister up with a boy from Dartmouth, who then dumped Sister and started going out with Friend.

You know, when I was thirteen the only real drama in my life was the constant "will they/won't they" situation with Best Friend and the time I nearly ruined the library's only copy of A Wrinkle In Time. I feel slightly miffed. And old.