welcome to downtown coolsville

Last night Amy and I went out to dinner with her mum, her ex-stepfather, and her stepbrothers. It was going quite well overall- there was wine and pasta and at one point the stepbrothers were yelling about their sister, who lives in Ottawa and seems to be universally hated, and it's always interesting to get a sudden window into other people's family drama- and then I had a conversation I've had more times than is strictly necessary. Which is to say, at all.

One of her stepbrothers was cold, and asked if anyone had a jacket he could borrow. I wasn't cold, and he looked kind of sad and puppylike, so I gave him mine. It's a green jacket with a yellow smiley face button on the lapel. He noticed it after a few minutes and asked- slurring a little because we were most of the way through a bottle at that point- what it was.

"It's a smiley face button," I said.

He shook his head. "It should be an anti-immigration button," he said.

Please note: we were not talking about immigration. We had not been talking about immigration the whole evening. As I recall, the last thing this gentleman and I had actually spoken about was his partner, Steven, and how they might be breaking up soon. So I suppose immigration was just on his mind, and he wanted to have a good long gumflap about how much he didn't like it. Or something.

I said, "My mother's an immigrant."

Now, in this conversation, saying that a person close to you (a family member or spouse for preference, although sometimes a close friend or coworker is good enough) is an immigrant has one of two results. Either 1) the person gets very embarrassed and backtracks, often naming all the perfectly lovely people they know who are immigrants, or 2) they ask where exactly the person is from. Which this gentleman did.

"The UK," I replied.

The gentleman made a face I've seen a fair few times during this conversation. When I tell people that my mother is an immigrant, they tend to assume I mean that she is not white, because that is the picture they have filed inside their head under "immigrant." An immigrant is a person of colour, or at least a delightfully "ethnic" shade of white. (Like a kooky Greek, maybe, or a fiery Italian.) The face is a sort of relieved grimace, an oh-thank-God-I-thought-you-might-be-one-of-them expression.

"Oh, well, that's different," he said. "That's not the kind of immigration I was talking about."

You always know the kind of immigration they're talking about. Always. But I bit anyway.

"What kind of immigration were you talking about?" I asked.

He waved his hands expressively. "You know," he said. "Terrorists!"

I shut the conversation down after that.

Ish: Hey, Eddie. Apparently Justin Bieber wants to punch the Jonas Brothers.
Little Brother: Really? Huh.
Ish: Man, who would you root for in that fight?
Little Brother: Um... if it was all the Jonas Brothers together? I'd have to go with Beebs. But if he just wanted to fight the fat gay one then I'd support the fat gay one.

Team Fat Gay One forever.

This morning, while rummaging through a bunch of old CDs in search of a song whose title I'd forgotten, I found a disc full of pictures. Specifically, pictures of a trip to Montreal, Ottawa, and Quebec City that my class took in ninth grade.

( You can guess where this is going, right? )

... is this funny to anyone who has never lived in Newfoundland/met a Newfoundlander/heard anything at all about Newfoundland culture and/or accents? Because I dies of it, b'ys.

(I work with people very much like the ones in that video. They hate me because I speak in sentences.)

In unrelated news, I lost my ChatRoulette-ginity the other night! I saw 44 dicks. But not all at once. I later learned that Michael Cera goes on CR fairly often, which worries me because dudes, what if Michael Cera has seen a dick? I don't know how I would deal with that. It is hard enough to deal with the fact that he has one. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he has a beautiful daffodil blooming between his thighs that weeps when it sees a sunset, or something.

ETA: I have been informed that the proper term is not "I dies of it" but "I dies at it." Newfoundland slang has rules, yo.

You know, if you'd told me four years ago that two of my favourite people in the world would not only end up collaborating and being besties but dating, I probably would have laughed. And then asked if I could share whatever drugs you were taking.

Funny ol' world, innit?

I love belly buttons.

They're like convenient little Smartie pockets.