hm.

long time no update.

well, here i am now. what do i say...?

1) we got a sweet haul for our non-denominational gift exchange. i got an ipod mini from the in-laws, and my sweetie got some high-quality hockey skates. got some new clothes, and JH brought me a jupo -- a rain skirt -- which he is now stubbornly refusing to accept repayment for... (thanks, JH). my sweetie got me an oilers jersey, which i will wear either when the nhl comes back, or when it's clear that it will never come back. to wear it now is just sort of wanky. apparently, he also ordered a sweatshirt with the cheat on it for me, but it hasn't arrived in the mail. i wonder if it will before we go back to van.

the grandmother in-law gave each of us a $500 cheque, which was sort of excessive, to say the least. one of these is going straight to the red cross in light of the tsunami disaster in south-east asia. it's staggering how many people that disaster's taken.

2) saw (or will see) most of the people i'd wanted to see, with the notable exceptions of KL&TH and M&L. i'm not sure what's going on with the former -- been e-mailing both of them for a while and they haven't responded at all, which leads me to believe that maybe they just don't want to see me (which is okay; i just sort of want to know). i'm thinking M&L may have read my blog entry where i said their wedding wasn't much fun and don't want to talk to me. *shrug*...?

3) i sent an invoice for my editing work done over december. i edited 411 pages. yeesh. also, the value of a euro has gone up, now i'm getting $4.95 CDN per page. wahoo!

4) been trying to lay out the january issue of the physics journal, and it's a total disaster. acquisitions have been poor, and my continual emphasis that the editors need to get me good photos and graphics just doesn't seem to be sinking in. also, the english editor has been retardedly slow to respond; i haven't even gotten his feedback for the proofs i've put out yet. fortunately, it seems that most schools are starting late this term (i don't go back until the 10th). we may have a couple of buffer days that i'm growing more and more confident we'll have to take.

5) still need to fix my CV and write my cover letters for my internship. blargh!

6) am sick. it was only a matter of time. DA was sick...DI was sick...the lack of sleep and dry air aren't helping.

7) looked up program requirements for a PhD in communications. 12 full-time terms or 6 years, it says. am i ready to make such a commitment?

i know edmonton sort of sucks, but it still bugs me sometimes to hear people talk smack about it. some don't understand why i would possibly miss this suburban dystopia, where south edmonton common has really gotten retardedly out of control. in addition to it being a large ungainly cluster of big-box stores where you're forced to drive to get from one store to the next, the traffic congestion around the area is unreal. way to concentrate all that's wrong with north america in one disgusting cold-sore of a place, kids.

yet, i like my hometown. today was the second day in a row of big ultra-blue sky. sunshine reflecting off the snow on the ground makes up for the early nights. vancouver may be 5 degrees above freezing, but being under nothing but clouds gets to you after a while.

unfortunately, all of the mucous membranes in my sinuses have shrivelled in retreat at the dry air. i've been drinking tonnes of water (edmonton tap water isn't full of cupric sediment like vancouver water is, incidentally), and it's all i can do to keep from getting a nosebleed.

also, my eyes hurt like hell, and i can't really tell if it's because it's dry, because i haven't been able to sleep like a normal person 'cause my dad likes to keep my room at meat-locker temperature, or because all i've been doing over the past four days is read undecipherable papers about fuzzy sets, weld pools and grinding by people who can't write in english and don't seem to mind. a new study says that people who stare at computer screens for long periods of time are more likely to get glaucoma. now that i've removed myself from a profession where i might blind myself with a laser, i seem to have chosen a different route to blindness. some might call it fate.

***

been reading publishing for profit for my management course next term....and it's a pretty crappy book. spelling idiosyncracies, clichés, and the layout is just horrible. i think it's what, 11.5/14 or something, and the margins on the book are about a quarter of an inch. it's a real travesty that a book on publishing can look and read that badly.

so! it appears that i will be speaking at nash! thomas *ahem* neglected to inform me of this when he'd scheduled it, leading me to assume that i was off the schedule and he was avoiding telling me. starting a magazine from scratch is supposedly my topic. i'm thinking about how to turn that into an hour-long session.

unfortunately, my speaking engagement coincides with my sweetie's birthday, as did last year's conference. oh well. i've got his gift all purchased (found it serendipitously while shopping for his christmas gift) so he shouldn't be too upset. three more sleeps till he arrives, and hopefully with my ibook.

***

my pants are too long, my mother has decided. "let me shorten them for you." every year, i come home with pants that might be a little frayed, and she takes it upon herself to shorten and rehem them, leaving me with a suitcase full of ridiculous garments that aren't quite long enough to be pants but much too long to be shorts.

i have forbidden her from altering any of my clothing this year. we'll see how well she does.

ah, dial-up.

at least it's something, and i'm not totally disconnected from the rest of the world. it's not quite as frustratingly slow as i'd braced myself for, either. i mean, what else am i going to do with my time?

arrived in edmonton yesterday evening, and am already feeling a bit under the weather. didn't help that i couldn't get to sleep until 3am mountain time and was woken up by a phone call (wrong number, apparently) at 8:30am. who the fuck calls people at 8:30 on a saturday, anyway?

my parents have this creepy photo-essay of my life framed in my bedroom like some sort of shrine. other than that, not much has changed. so far, i've just been diligently earning my pay, 3 euros at a time. i'd told the supervising editor that i would have only sporadic e-mail access, so before i left van, he'd uploaded about 50 articles for me to work on over my 'holidays,' at my request. don't mind working -- just eagerly anticipating actually being able to spend some time with my friends.

i'd wanted to bring my ibook to edmonton (where all of my CV stuff i need to finish for my internship applications, my paper on math typography and my physics journal shit are, not to mention indesign), but it hadn't been fixed yet by the time i left town. hopefully it'll be done by the time my sweetie flies out here.

this entry is turning into quite the muddled hodgepodge of crap. what else? oh, my mother is livid at my passive-aggressive, gossipy bitch of an aunt (by marriage). it seems she's been talking smack about me to my relatives in hong kong. i don't care, but my mother does. according to the aunt, i'm fickle, flighty and i'm never going to graduate or find a decent job. that, apparently, was enough to set off some sort of rabid mother bear syndrome in my mom. it's kind of funny to watch, but she really does just need to relax.

okay, it's become painfully apparent that i have nothing of any value to say here. i think it just feels good to be online, which may be a sign that i should sign off.

i leave for edmonton tomorrow. i'll be there almost a week before my sweetie arrives. i haven't spent that much concentrated time alone with my parents in a long, long time. i anticipate that i'll have a good time for about the first couple of days, and then it will get excrutiating.

also, all they have is a dial-up internet connection.

will i survive?

so, kids, if you're in edmonton, call me up. please.

please.

the great fridge purge.

i've had an inordinately large amount of soup this weekend. i found half a bag of floppy carrots and turned it into carrot ginger soup. not bad, but it's a lot of soup, especially with the butternut squash soup i had on friday and saturday. it looks like i'm in for more, too -- minestrone, perhaps -- as there's also a rather large bag of hot house tomatoes on the verge of spoilage...

beyond the soup, though, i seem to be running out of food, and i'm leaving in five days, so i'm not even sure i should buy more groceries.

***

text & context final exam tomorrow. eeeee...

i seem to be fated to have laptops break on me, then have the repair people mistype my phone number into the work order. the same thing happened to me when my pc laptop got sad in june. fortunately, mac repairpeople care a lot more, in my opinion, and generally seem way more competent.

i called today after not having heard from them at all, worried that they'd been trying to reach me through the errant phone number in their database. turns out the unit is still somehow under some miraculous warranty (despite the fact that thomas had had it for, what, over two years?) and they've already ordered the parts. they said nothing about having to wipe the hard drive, so i'm hoping that it doesn't have to happen. i actually haven't owned it long enough to have too much content on it; i just don't want to lose the software that i *cough* don't have the cds for. i hope to get it back sometime early next week.

i leave for edmonton on the 10th. my sweetie doesn't leave until the 16th. i'm going early so that my parents can no longer complain that i spend all of my time in town out with my friends and not with them. i really should spend some more time with them, though -- both have had elective surgery this past year.

anyway, there's a tentative plan to head to brooks on boxing day for a corb lund concert (sans geoff berner!).

***

had dmac and his girl over for dinner last night. we had a great winter meal: butternut squash soup, homemade yam gnocchi and punkin pie. also, balsamic-marinated chicken and watercress and red radish salad. yum.

i still have tonnes of punkin pie left, so gerry and smorg, if you're reading this, you should come up for pie and hot chocolate or some such.

right. i should really write this essay so i can get studying for my final on monday, hmm?

you know, protesters' "hey-hey, ho-ho" chants are lame enough. do they really need to put political lyrics to 'my bonnie lies over the ocean'?

***

pierre berton died. huh.

my ibook is sad.

i dunno what's wrong with it. the display got all fucked up after it fell asleep, then when i tried to restart it, all it gave me was a blank screen. i charged it up overnight, and by morning, it seemed to boot up, but then it fucked up again after it fell asleep.

~sigh~

and i've only had it for a month.

fortunately, i have my old computer, so i'm not totally up shit creek for my text & context paper, but all of my notes were on the ibook. i dropped it off today for repairs. we'll see how much i'll have to fork over in a few days. i hope i can get it back before heading home to edmonton.

***

went to S&A's wedding this weekend. it was lovely. they're so sweet together that if my relationship weren't solid, i'd have thrown up or something. and the more weddings i go to, the more i realize that M&L's wedding, the first i'd been to, was actually quite bad--i didn't have very much fun at all.

my sweetie's off for a 10-day stint in switzerland. i'm not sure if his absence has had a positive or negative effect on my productivity.

okay. one paper, one presentation and one final to go...

our class went to the bruce mau 'massive change' exhibit at the art gallery today. it's supposed to be all about the future of global design. i'd really wanted to go when i first heard about it, but as the weeks went by, my enthusiasm dwindled, primariliy because i heard that it was massive crap.

our group got a guided tour of the installation, though not a comprehensive one. our tour guide was essentially pierre bernard, 'pierre bernard's recliner of rage' on late night with conan o'brien, without the lisp. the cadence and pace of his speech was so perplexingly bizarre.

"am i asking a rhetorical question?"

his whole tour was essentially that (it'd have been hilarious if he'd actually said that) -- he'd pose one question after another, and it was never clear whether he'd actually want us to respond. he'd pause, wait, wait, wait...then ask another question. coupled with the visual assault of the exhibit itself, the general tour experience was exhausting, and sort of a waste of my time. the exhibit, despite being gratuitously huge, was underwhelming, and i had other things i need to get done. oh well. at least i'm in a program where we get to go on field trips. are you?

***

leaving for scott and anne's wedding tomorrow. i haven't even started packing yet, though it shouldn't take long. i have to leave straight from school to the airport, so i have to take my shit with me to class. i wish i had less to do; then i'd actually enjoy this trip. i'm generally not as excited about scott and anne's wedding as i guess i ought to be about two good friends getting married. probably because it feels like they've been married for a while already, and because we're not going to know very many people at the event. also, did i mention i'm drowning in work?

only today did i manage to finish writing my design paper, and i have yet to typeset it, which is going to take me at least two more hours. i haven't started my text and context paper on scholarly publishing, nor have i started research for my libel presentation. poo. my efforts to track down libel lawyers and editors to talk to have been fruitless to date, and i'm rapidly running out of time.

yet, it'll all be over in a week and a half.

fucking insane.

drowning...

i'm supposed to do a presentation for my design class, which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem, if i didn't have to do it on monday. yeesh. it's supposed to be about the typography of mathematics. it'll be interesting, i thought. once i started doing research (about a week and a half later than i ought to have), only to find that (heh) there aren't really any good sources out there.

whee!

there was a book called the handbook of typography for the mathematical sciences listed in the sfu library catalogue. sounds perfect, hmm? unfortunately, it was on loan. checked ubc library, and they didn't have it. desperation mode led me too check chapters on-line. no luck. amazon.ca had it, thankfully, and i ordered it with rush shipping.

yesterday afternoon, the buzzer rang.

'hello?'

'this is canada post with a package for nori maki.'

'oh. come on up.'

that was fast, i thought. but awesome, i'll have my book, and i might be able to pull this off after all. i heard a knock, opened the door, and the canada post dude handed me this massive box of canned fish from the st. jean cannery in nanaimo and left me gaping at the door, completely perplexed.

it was addressed to me alone. i had no idea what to make of it.

i e-mailed my sweetie, confused. were we expecting a big random box of canned fish? he called later that evening and said that he'd forgotten to tell me, but his mom was sending me a box of fish as a graduation present.

can't say that i'm not grateful. it's just quite possibly the most bizarre graduation present i have ever gotten.

anyway, the book i ordered arrived today, and it turns out to be kind of a useless piece of poo. i think i'm going to extract all i can for my presentation and *ahem* send it back.

also, i've been trying for the past three days to install metafont on my computer, with zero success.

first, it gave me

dyld: /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/mf can't open library: /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.6.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

when i tried to compile the code. i looked on the ol' information superhighway for a solution, and it told me to install fink and get the "lesstif-shlibs" package. i tried. i got

Failed: Can't resolve dependency "gcc3.1" for package "xfree86-4.4.0-13" (no matching packages/versions found)

procured the X11 tools cd from the ubyssey and installed X11, gcc2.95.2 on my computer.

tried installing "lesstif-shlibs" again.

same error.

*fume*! help?

***

so i have a presentation and a paper on the typography of mathematics for my design class, a paper on scholarly publishing for text and context, and a presentation on libel for editing. i went to ubc to drain the libraries of their books: found four libel books at the law library, three books on scholarly publishing at koerner library, a couple of books on the history of mathematical notation at the math library...i find it peculiar that now that i'm no longer a student at ubc, i'm going out of my way to exploit that university's resources. i mean, before today, i'd never even been inside the law or the math libraries.

so...much...work.

oh...

i earned 42 euros yesterday.

for lunch today, i had ten bits of leftover deep-fried cheese, six pieces each of brocolli and cauliflower, and a mandarin orange.

yeah, i'm gonna die.

that's what i get for having a fingerfood potluck, i guess. it was good times -- five of my publishing friends came, along with a bunch of ubyssey kids, and a few odd characters from a few odd places. not surprisingly, few physics-types showed up. anyway, it was fun, and by virtue of the fact that it was a fingerfood party, the clean-up this morning wasn't terribly horrific. i seriously need to vacuum, though.

i made tuna tartar served on romaine lettuce leaves, which my sweetie seemed to enjoy. people brought samosas, bread and cheese, cookies, pumpking pie, mushroom pate and, yes, deep-fried cheese bits, among some other more unusual dishes, including curried deviled eggs with, uh, raisins.

today, i scanned the leftovers: about half a glass of red wine, a single falafel ball; two slices of baguette topped with tomato, feta and red pepper spread; ten cheese bits; a tub of seven-layer dip; a quarter of a bag of corn chips; some cauliflower and brocolli from the veggie platter; two separate baguettes halves...

somehow, a lone falafel ball doesn't quite seem as inviting the day after a party.

SW didn't make it last night, though. on thursday, he was dressed up as a cowboy and taken out for his stag: to memphis blues, the railway club, then a gay bar. he'd gotten so intoxicated at the railway club that he was apparently talking to the little model train that runs around the establishment, after which he had at least seven additional drinks. his roommate tells us that since that night, he's only left his bedroom to go to the bathroom. he'll never want to be single again.

***

so! i got hooked up with a freelance copy-editing position. it called for someone who had a science background, had editing experience and knew LaTeX, and i guess that made me an apt candidate. it pays 3 euros a page, and the dude who's doling out the work estimates that i'd be able to do 4-5 pages once i'm trained, but i'm not sure. so far, i've worked on this one six-page manuscript for over five hours...

i'm supposed to copy-edit articles for a journal published by springer -- the international journal of advanced manufacturing technology (titillating, no?), which, apparently, are written largely by non-english speakers. i'm finding it hard to know whether a bizarre term i come across is an idiosyncracy in translation or whether it's an esoteric term used in advanced manufacturing technology. i'm learning, i guess, but it seems to be taking me a fuck of a long time.

point is, i'm getting income soon. not very much, but maybe i can break even now instead of digging into my dwindling savings.

well, back to work...

i'm rich!

well, not quite. but at least i can eat again.

i turned in my six keys, and got $145 back in deposit. my keychain is unrecognizably lighter. i also endeavoured to get my tuition reimbursed. according to the chick at student services, i'll have $282 credited to my visa in two or three weeks.

taking money back from ubc feels so good...

***

friday night fingerfood potluck! i'm excited.

it's quite, quite retarded that the night when the launching of fireworks is the most prevalent is the night when you have hundreds of kids running about the streets.

vancouver is weird.

nori maki, MSc.

catharsis!

today was what they call a tremendous day.

text & context was cancelled, so i was able to finish up my final thesis corrections early in the morning. my second reader had returned the manuscript to my supervisor, who'd relayed that 'there is not much by way of corrections,' which was great news, but before i actually laid eyes on the manuscript, i had no idea whether he was basing that judgment solely on the amount of ink on the paper. i had paranoid spells of wondering if it'd be covered in short comments that would take a lot of time to correct. 'rewrite,' for instance, or 'this is all wrong.'

it was just a few casualties of editing here and there. it took me about 25 minutes to fix up the thesis, another hour to distill it, then yet another hour waiting for kinko's to print it up (77 dollars for three copies!?).

i had a design midterm, but besides one question that i sort of blanked out on, the rest of the questions were pretty awesome. 'what is CMYK?'

i haven't had a midterm like that in a long time. i love my design instructor.

anyway, right before i left harbour centre, ZBP came by with thomas's (well, now my) computer! yeah, the one i'd been waiting since the end of september for. i haven't played with it yet, but i've got it.

as soon as i got onto ubc campus, it was a whirlwind of errands: get thesis signed by my second reader, drop off dmac's prayer flags and basil's tickets at the newspaper, get thesis signed by supervisor, run to the faculty of graduate studies...

i got in by the skin of my teeth; at 3:56. the office closes at 4, officially. i thought they were going to give me a hard time about there being colour in my thesis, but the lady reviewing my thesis didn't really say much about it at all.

'so you know this colour won't show up in microfiche, right?'

'yeah, i know.'

'okay. i just wanted to make sure you knew.'

she signed some forms, accepted my thesis, and now i have an MSc!

i went and had a great long talk with the hilariously flamboyant grad secretary, then i ran into MTh on the way out the building, who bought me tea as we sat and caught up for a while.

got to chat with dmac for a bit, then went to say hi to my sweetie in the lab. he ended up relenting after not too much arm-twisting and came out to dinner with me at the vietnamese noodle house. i haven't had dinner with my sweetie in a long time.

finally, the night sky was almost completely clear -- perfect conditions to see the lunar eclipse.

oh, and thomas should be getting into town sometime tonight. whee!

now, i am at home, wrapped in a blanket, warm and happy.

***

i have been invited to no fewer than three different election-watching parties. i am torn.

today at school, i was given a $25 gift certificate to the sfu bookstore because i could spell more words from the letters in "publish" in three minutes than anyone else in my class.

i feel special.

so i didn't want to jinx it, but i guess there's no point being irrationally superstitious.

i submitted my thesis to a second reader yesterday.

my excitement is subdued, since it obviously isn't a done deal yet. with any hope, i'll be done before the end of this month.

now i wait. i hope the second reader doesn't ask me to rewrite the whole thing.

also, i now have to do a presentation about my thesis work in november; some requirement of the physics department that i didn't know about. i know i'm being utterly paranoid, but i'm afraid i'll give my presentation, and someone will ask me a simple question i totally can't answer and somehow, someone will rescind my master's degree.

ugh.

why do i care, anyway? i'm getting a new master's. maybe 'cause i figure i'm owed a degree considering how much the thesis shortened my life.

***

my text and context prof sort of offered me a 'project manager' job today. it was weird. i thought he was proposing an internship, but it turns out it's for an academic journal grant proposal that's due in april. i want to do it, but i'd be so swamped. it'd be paid though. the more i think about it, the more i really want to be involved. i just don't know if i can handle the workload.

i don't know what to do for my internship. you, reading this: what do you think? i'm being torn in 6 different directions:

(a) ccsp press: the canadian centre for studies in publishing (the department that runs my mpub program) is going to be starting up its own press. tentatively, anyway. i'm totally stoked on being involved in this academic press right from the beginning. i think my internship report would be really relevant and hot.

(b) MOMENTUM: my beloved MOMENTUM is coming back...? that's the rumour, anyway. if it's being relaunched and the timing is right, i'd want to be involved. i could do editorial, design and management for a magazine that i love. i'm sort of wary of working for a publication that seems perpetually on the brink of collapse, though. i guess that doesn't really leave me with that many options.

(c) arsenal pulp press: small press that prints a load of really really awesome titles. they also share an office with geist. i think i could learn a lot, but the student who interned there this past summer says that she was relegated to menial duties. also, she didn't get paid.

(d) adbusters: talked to a dude at media democracy day and they seem amenable to taking interns. i'm not sure if i'd rather work in their editorial or design departmenti don't know if i'd be paid, though -- almost seems counter to their philosophy. that typically wouldn't be a concern for me -- lord knows i've done my fair share of unpaid thankless work out of love for the publication -- given my current situation, i'd sort of like to make enough money to eat.

(e) bcamp: the bc association of magazine publishers. one of the other students in the program used to work there and said there would be a lot to do. i've always wanted to work for a publishers' association and do some policy work. i don't know if i'd be paid, though.

(f) ubc press: i'd be on the ubc campus (where my sweetie and old friends and the ubyssey are) and, according to one of the students in the program last year, her supervisor asked for a report to be turned in at the end of the summer, meaning that she was essentially done her internship report for the program before september. also, she was paid.

mhmmmmm...it's something to mull over. i talked to my prof about all of this today, and he said 'they all sound like viable options.'

doesn't really help me make a decision. *shrug*

oh god, i want to die. or kill. actually, mostly kill.

i was supposed to submit my final draft to my second reader tomorrow. my supervisor gave me his corrections on friday and said he'd like to do a final minor edit (ugh) before i submitted the thesis. i told him i'd try to get it to him early afternoon on sunday and if he sent it back to me with a minor copy edit, i could probably have it to him monday morning.

he sends me the 'copy-edited' version, full yet again of retarded corrections of digitally scrawled corrections on the PDF, some of which didn't even make grammatical sense, as well as one thing that he perceived to be an eggregious omission that, he says, "i should have caught earlier."

fuck you. fuck you!

"why didn't you vary pitch?" he asks.

uh...because you told me i didn't have to? now i'm not sure what's happening. i have to make all sorts of additions that are going to take a ridiculous amount of time, and my second reader probably won't get it back in time if i submit it too late. and i have to get the final version in by 31 october, or i'm humped. financially, that is. also, the book project at school (real school) is picking up. these next three weeks are going to be utter hell.

fuck.

ROAR!

no, i think this is a rare occasion that merits numerous exclamation points.

ROAR!!!

***

however, i did make home-made spinach-ricotta cannelloni tonight. it was yummy. it almost makes up for the fact that it's almost 2 am and i'm still not done my thesis. actually, it really doesn't.

sigh.

here's a harrowing thought: a simpsons live-action movie.

once the simpsons finally goes off the air (not soon enough), it'll take a generation for it to sort of peter out, then some ass in hollywood's going to cast the spawn of freddy prinze jr. and sarah michelle gellar as bart.

it's going to happen. you know it.

with any hope, i'll be long dead. if not, i guess i'll just have to burn something down.

***

after getting my latest round of corrections from my supervisor, where he:
(a) re-corrected passages that he had corrected in the first place, essentially restoring them to the way they were in the first place
(b) corrected certain passages and inserted rather substantial queries that he could have (and should have) been dealt with on, oh, the first or the second reading, maybe? yarrgh. frustrations...

...i put my foot down and gave him an ultimatum. this next version i send will be the final one, i told him. the one to be sent to the second reader. no more changes! if there is still something heinously wrong with it, he should have caught it sooner, i say. if i submit any later than 31 october, i'm out another $300, which, as you'll recall from a couple of posts back, i cannot afford.

he seems to have responded well to it, so it looks like, after this weekend, i'll be ready to send the damn thing to a second reader. then, a week later, i should have any last corrections done. then i submit, and with any hope, i'll never have to talk to anybody about fucking photonic fucking crystals fucking ever again!

some of my publishing friends are urging me to have a big party when i finish. i think they just want me to buy them booze and cook them food.

***

i really really want to see team america. but i'm po'. also, i have no time.

some random shit:

-nobody seems to be reading this blog anymore. *shrug*. probably my fault for not making it more compelling.

-my kitchen is splattered with pumpkin (rightly pronounced 'punkin') bits. i probably expended more calories chopping up the pumpkin than i'll ever get out of it. soon, though, my house will be infused with the amazing aroma of pumpkin pie. the pumpkin that my sweetie bought was big and kind of stringy; i don't think it'll work that well for soup. but i did manage to get about two cups worth of seeds out of it, and i think the whole thing cost about 50 cents.

-i think i'm more or less done my thesis. i don't want to get too exuberant about it prematurely, though -- that was my mistake last week, and when i was brought down, it put me in a foul mood for days. i'd like to have a party for everyone i've ever complained to about my thesis, but unfortunately, i'm po'.

-i was supposed to get thomas's ibook this past week, but no news from ZBP, who was acting as courier. maybe she just decided to keep it for herself?

-this will be the first year in three S&A and we won't be having thanksgiving dinner, and it's sort of bumming me out. i feel like it's the first in a list of traditions that we developed to support each other during the hellish experience of our master's degrees to die and that more will soon follow.

-my house is a total disaster. there is paper everywhere, a pile of dirty dishes and clothes strewn throughout the apartment. i know how i'll be spending my holiday tomorrow...

i am po'.

my sweetie calculated our finances this weekend and found that with his reduced income, my lack of income, our mortgage payments and other bills, we are left with roughly $2 per meal.

shit.

anyone want to have me over for dinner?

"you need to make it more a thesis and less a list of facts."

that's what i got out of my meeting with my supervisor.

he didn't even seem to notice my "thesis schmesis" shirt.

actually, it's a "thesis shmesis" shirt, by virtue of the chick at bang-on's screw-up. and i realized yesterday that every time i wore the shirt, i'd have to explain that to people around me. it has already grown tiresome.

also: i hate taking the bus home at the same time rez trash is trying to get off campus. i want to submit my thesis so that i never have to do that again.

i thought i was so close. so close. i've been almost done my thesis for the past month now, and it's really starting to piss me off. now, after this meeting with the supervisor, my workload for tomorrow's just been doubled.

excellent.

some good stuff did happen today, but i'll post about that later. now i must froth.

wow.

evelyn lau (author of runaway: diary of a street kid) came to talk to our editing class today. she just talked about what it was like to be an author being edited, but just being in her presence was so...raw.

she published runaway when she was just 18 and listening to her speak and realizing what she's been through made me at once grateful that i never had to experience any of her hardships and sort of disappointed that i would never have the scope to be a genuinely profound writer.

i mean, i've had such a pedestrian upbringing...the brilliant creative geniuses that rise to acclaim, whether it be in writing or in art, seem to have had such hard lives -- most either psychologically disturbed or drug-addicted, or both -- and it makes me wonder if i'd need a similar kind of afliction to really understand.

evelyn lau was so articulate and seemed so warm and, well, normal. just speaking to her now, it's virtually impossible to picture her as a strung-out hooker on a vancouver street corner. it was amazing to hear her relay her experience with such linguistic perfection and then to realize that she didn't have an education past the age of 14.

that said, our editing instructor, who happened to edit runaway, actually, told us that she probably wasn't sustaining herself with just her writing and was likely getting some money from some freelance editing she was doing on the side. for some reason, i inexplicably found myself concerned for her well-being, something i don't feel i have the right to do.

wow.

i wrote the conclusion to my thesis on thursday night. i expected it to be much more cathartic an experience than it was, but i'm still glad that i've pretty much got the bulk of it done.

i asked the supervisor if it was at all realistic to expect to be able to submit my thesis before the 8 october deadline.

"it's not impossible," he says.

which means that if i elect to get no sleep and work on it every waking moment, it'll be down to the wire.

the first battery of corrections rolled in from my supervisor tonight. he's out of town, so he's got some funky-ass program that lets him scrawl notes on a PDF. he sent me the document full of barely-legible digitally rendered scribbles, but you know what? it's feedback, which is more than i've gotten in the last two weeks.

this weekend, i have to finish a paper for my text and context course, after having finally finished reading blockbusters and trade wars yesterday, a full week after i intended to be done with it. it doesn't seem like the paper should be that difficult, but for some reason, it's a bit of a time sink-hole for me right now. i aim to get it done tonight, meaning i should be up until 2 am. i also have to write a 5-page manuscript evaluation (requiring a partial re-reading of my manuscript) for my editing course and two TI sheets for the book publishing project. i'm expected to make corrections to my thesis in the meantime, something i'm not entirely sure where to fit. i'm way behind on my reading...oh...

went to dmac's for dinner tonight, though. shrimp and veggies in a green curry sauce on rice. and peanut-butter-cream pie. yum. oh yeah, and i got to see the incredibly (like, REALLY) phallic lava lamp that his parents brought him. what would his sigmund freud action figure say?

tomorrow, i go to the word on the street festival. first time i've gone, and i'm really excited about it. next saturday's sort of freaking me out, though. i'm sitting on a blogging panel for media democracy day and i have no idea what to prepare or what i should say.

i'm at my lab and the draft of my thesis is printing right now. the printer's taking its sweet time: one page every 12 seconds or so. somehow, the monstrous piece of garbage ballooned to 88 pages. maybe i inserted a few too many schematic diagrams.

anyway, i really shouldn't post if i don't have anything relevant to say. but maybe someone will post some encouraging comments about how i'll make it through this week without an aneurysm?

mpub's a lot of work, yes, but i'm still loving it. next saturday, i will be a corpse, but a happy corpse.

excellent.

others have graciously done what i wish i had but don't have time to do:

http://hate.erstwhiledelight.com/comicsans/

http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/comicsans.html

http://bancomicsans.com/home.html

now: just 300 pages to go in blockbusters.

ugh...

i still need to:
-put a real-space field plot into my thesis
-analyze the gaussian positioning simulation results
-write up the gaussian positioning simulation results
-write my conclusion
-insert my citations
-tighten up my introduction, which currently really really sucks.

i also have to finish reading (i just started yesterday) the over 400-page blockbusters and trade wars, three chapters in my prof's book, five papers on communication, culture and economics, my editing manuscript, two chapters in elements of typographic style and some pages in pocket pal by this weekend. i also have to finish my editing assignment, write up our publising imprint's mission statement, and start the review of blockbusters.

jebus.

i wish i could read faster.

mmmmm...

man, my apartment smells so fuckin' good right now...

i took a 3-hour break from thesis/publishing to bake apple pies. i don't know if they taste good, but they sure look and smell sexy.

i want to take a couple to the ubyssey kids tomorrow and maybe one for the mpub crew, but i don't want to seem like i'm trying too hard. maybe i'll just leave the mpub one at home for the guests i'm expecting for the game on tuesday.

thursday's and friday's classes were superb. i love my editing instructor; she's a big bag of fun. she's given us each a manuscript -- a real manuscript -- to work on for the term, and i have no idea how she keeps track of everything. apparently, it's customary for the editors not to have any of the manuscripts bound -- they just keep stacks of paper loosely kept together with rubber bands. the sample manuscripts our instructor brought in to show us were almost pristine; the corners were a little worn, but my one-week-old thesis draft looks more dog-earred than her copy of an edited manuscript that had been read time and time again. i don't know how i'll keep my manuscript from getting scrambled, disheveled and covered with food stains.

editing book manuscripts, it appears, is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. or perhaps editing in an industry outside of the student press is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. it's become quite evident that descriptivism has little place in book editing, and since the timeline is a lot more drawn out for a book than for a serial, there is emphasis on a certain conservative perfection.

i can't say that all of the books i've read have conformed to this standard, but it seems we'll be expected to adhere to it, in any case.

we've also been given a short editing test, and it's pretty much the worst piece ever written! god! it's truly, truly wretched: run-ons, incomplete sentences, sentences that just end, a complete lack of logical flow, spelling errors, diction and syntax errors, convoluted structure and generally uninteresting subject matter...i guess they're trying to throw everything at us to see how we'd do. i've seen worse submissions to the physics journal, but i've never had to edit any of them, 'cause i've always had the luxury of refusing to publish if i thought an article were sufficiently bad.

...i hadn't mentioned this earlier because the outcome was still in question, but one of the students who was supposed to be in our cohort was stopped at the border when he tried to cross up to canada from the states on tuesday. he's been trying to sort it out, but now it doesn't look like they'll solve the problem in time for him to join us. now, there are only three males in 17 students. we don't know, of course, why he was detained at the border. for lack of a better theory, i'm going with coke mule.

a few things i keep forgetting to mention:

i) mpub is the antiphysics. out of 18 students, 14 are female.

ii) i met three other edmontonians in the program yesterday. eerie. but cool. they all seem like solid people.

iii) sfu, like ubc, is a corporate whore of an institution. but sfu doesn't even try to be subtle about it. forget subway-sponsored orientation sessions; at the harbour centre campus, there's a labatt lecture theatre and a royal bank computer lab, just to name a couple.

iv) because it's so heavily sponsored, though, the building is emaculate, and i feel hideously underdressed. i also feel like i'm going to gain 30 kg by the end of the term 'cause everything moves for me. there are escalators and elevators -- nobody even knows where the stairs are, and i'm pretty sure they only open out to the ground floor.

v) sweet, sweet schematic diagrams. the key to turning a dry flimsy 16-page piece of poo into an MSc thesis. i'm about 3/4 of the way there...

mpub!

i had a first extraordinary class today. in text and context, we listened to a clip from a lecture given by lawrence lessig -- i still can't decide if he's a raging hippie or a crazy libertarian -- who thinks that everything should be free and in the public domain. he's on a mission to wrestle control of intellectual property, particularly that found on the internet, away from large corporations. his argument is that the concept of copyright is stifling culture.

it's a bit extreme, and completely neglects the incentive that copyright offers authors to create new material, but it sparked some compelling discussion.

the class was unlike anything i'd been to -- a complete departure from the prototypical university lecture; it looks like the course'll be more like a CUP conference, with discussion groups and guest speakers from the industry.

however, it looks like i'm going to have to do a buttload (yes, a buttload) of reading for this one course alone, and i'll have to rediscover how to write essays and term papers, something i haven't done in eons.

but i'm so excited!

and: i am a rockstar.

i never fancied myself much of a graphic designer; i knew the basic news design rules, but i never thought i had much of an artistic eye.

turns out i can design the pants off of most people in my class, with the exception of a few. i have to revel in it now, 'cause i know the learning curve for the other folks'll catch up with me frighteningly soon.

the mountain of reading and my thesis are conspiring to crush my soul, though, so i'm going to put a bit more of a dent in the old MSc.

i start school at my mpub tomorrow, and i'm quite, quite excited. so much that i have that nagging worry that i'll set my alarm clock wrong -- the whole am/pm thing -- and i'll be embarassingly late for my first day of school. i should really get to bed and try to get some rest (if i can -- my body still isn't allowing me to get a decent sleep despite my being utterly exhausted); i'm already a half an hour late for my desired bedtime. ah well. at least i'll get to bed earlier than the kids at the paper will... they have a sixteen pager, new unfamilar software (quark 6) and when i left at 10, the fonts weren't working properly and barely any of the photos were done.

today, i was supposed to head out for a picnic at the last MOMpop of the summer with HT, but i ended up flaking out and staying for lunch at home (which my sweetie didn't end up cooking until 2:30). technically, it was my breakfast, as i hadn't eaten anything beforehand, anticipating always that, oh, lunch should come soon enough.

ugh.

HT just ended up dropping off some baguettes and running off to the park alone. i met up with him and HP (!) later on and we hung out for a bit and ate gelato. a much-needed respite from my hours in front of the computer trying to get LaTeX to compile properly.

i picked up a few zines, and dmac's story was in it, but mine was not. they'd forgotten about my submission, apparently, so here is the little vignette for the zine, themed 'work less/play':

Cliff has not taken a single day off in ten years.

His dedication has earned him the proud distinction of 'employee of the
month' eight months running, a streak that started when he took on those
extra shifts on the weekend. He did come perilously close to losing the
title a couple months back when his eight-year-old daughter had a piano
recital at school and really ramped up the pressure on him to attend.

He held firm, though. "Daddy's got to work," he told her. He was being a
good provider, he justified it to himself. After all, those piano lessons
don't pay for themselves, and besides, he's diligently saving up his RRSPs
for his retirement in twenty years. When he finally retires, there'll be
plenty of time to spend with the family, which, at the moment, rarely ever
sees him. They realize, surely, that some sacrifices have to be made.

No matter - he's made his office into a home away from home, complete with
a kitchenette, with an endless supply of coffee and cereal bars, as well
as a small medicine cabinet with the latest in over-the-counter antacids
to temper his nagging ulcer.

It's all worth it, though. He doesn't have anything else to brag about,
really - he never really got into the arts all that much and he isn't
about to take time off to work on his golf game. His spotless work record
is his badge of honour.

"Ten years, eh?" his coworkers marvel at the company Christmas party.
"Wow...I could never do that."

Cliff beams with pride and rubs his wrists. The Carpal-tunnel that comes
and goes is back again.

You are a modern-day hero, Cliff. We salute you.

***

tonight, JW picked me up and set me down in a cardboard box. then he tried to haul me around in said cardboard box. i was unplussed.

on my way home, a woman saw a wounded pigeon and began to talk to it in a soothing voice. 'hey there, sweetheart. are you okay? you're not flying away... are you okay?'

if i were that pigeon, i'd be all 'no i'm not, but there's nothing you can do about it, so why don't you just leave me the hell alone?'

***

anyway, to the batcave!

or, to bed.

mathematica licks my balls.

wow.

i'm thesising to supertramp.

i never would have predicted this.

...

ugh...

i was intending on sleeping in this morning -- i really was.

got to bed at 2 am, not because of some wild s&m party with php-laced mdma, but because i'd been working on my thesis all day. my wrists are even beginning to get sore, something that happens when i've been at the keyboard and track pad a little too long.

problem is, i didn't really add any actual content yesterday; i was mostly just fighting with LaTeX to get the formatting right and spending hours trying to learn what the fuck i'm supposed to do to get adobe illustrator to give me an equivalent of i can get in ms-paint in a matter of seconds. i love LaTeX nerds who insist that it's the best typesetting software EVER and anyone who uses anything else is beneath them. truth is, LaTeX is a pain in the ass, as i expected it would be. yesterday was a continuous cycle of debugging and compiling, re-debugging and re-compiling. i honestly think that although i'd have to format my list of figures, table of contents and bibliography manually, i'd be mostly done all of this formatting garbage if i were working with quark.

like anything that the physics computer 'purists' insist is the superior alternative (e.g. UNIX) LaTeX has all of these unintuitive obscure commands that take special packages i have to find on convoluted download sites that are among the most poorly organized website i've ever visited.

anyway, seems my body will not let me sleep until i get the lion's share of this monstrosity done. doesn't really bode well...

i think i might write my acknowledgements today: i would like to thank the administrators of the corporate whore of an institution, ubc, my cranky supervisor and my lab's stifling social environment for jointly conspiring to make these past two years of my life both unenlightening and painfully disillusioning.

mh.

back to work. at least i have the lovin' spoonful to keep me company: did you ever have to make up your mind? pick up on one and leave the other behind. it's not often easy, and not often kind. did you ever have to make up your mind?

i sure have. sweet lady physics will no longer be getting my love...in fact, i've been cheating on her for some time now.

toilet seats.

the topic came up when i noticed that dmac, who is still squatting at our apartment -- and, incidentally, is one of the most considerate house guests we've ever had -- appeared to be quite, well, what north american society would prescribe to be 'well trained' in the art of putting the toilet seat down. apparently, though he lived in a household of three males and one female, the habit of putting the seat down is now so engrained, it's automatic.

my sweetie, on the other hand, has no such inclination, though also having grown up in a household of three males and a single female. it's a coin toss whether i'll find the seat up or down when i walk into our bathroom.

courtesy or etiquette, it seems, dictates that a man should always put the seat down after he's done taking a leak. i've never been a huge believer in this, just because i think it's just as fair for a woman to have to put the seat down if she needs it down as it is for a man to put it up if he needs it up.

so why has this seat issue been made into the stuff of crappy sitcoms? why is the down position considered the default, anyway? is it because women always need it down, and men sometimes need it down; therefore, it should be down most of the time?

yeah, there had been times of grogginess early on when i'd wandered into the bathroom and sat down, expecting there to be a seat and instead finding my ass treated to an ice-cold ceramic bowl...which is why now, i always check if there's a seat before i sit. i figured it much easier to train myself to check rather than train someone else (i guess it'd be my dad at that point) to put the seat down.

point is, i have absolutely no idea why people make such a big deal out of this. men never ask for directions. men don't replenish the toilet paper. men never put the toilet seat down.

well, women never put the seat back up.

***

you, reading this. yeah, you. weigh in on this, would ya? i haven't gotten comments in a long time, even with what i considered quasi-compelling content (and requests for help, you fuckers). hence, i offer drivel in the hopes of evoking some responses.

oh! two more days until freedom!

well, it will be more than that, since i've got at least 1/3 of my thesis to write yet. but friday is the last day that i believe i'm expected to be in the lab. i'll probably have to go in to gussy up diagrams and what not, and there are a few simulations that i'm still expected to run...seems my work will become my hobby and my hobby my work.

uh.

i'm never going to finish my thesis, am i?

the supervisor gave me some of the most useless feedback regarding what i've written so far. 'well, it's well-written. and nothing is sounding off any alarm bells. but you've got some blanks to fill in, of course.'

hm. of course.

no specifics about one section not being thorough enough or another section missing relevant information. no comments on how my diagrams should look. no feedback on the structure of the thesis and which sections should be rearranged. yeesh. i'm glad i don't care about this thing; otherwise, i might just be concerned at how profoundly in the dark i am.

the one thing that worries me just a bit is my tuition situation. since i'm not officially finished, i'll have to pay tuition this term. no job. two tuitions. better start cutting back on those high-priced escorts.

you know, if the americans refuse to use the metric system, the very least they could do is not spell 'litre' and 'centimetre' like jackasses.

ohhhhhhh...

day of übermisery...

i am so beyond exhausted. the house is empty and desolate and the kitchen is a sty.

i had intended on spending the day at home writing my thesis; i was -- and am -- feeling a bit under the weather. really really really lethargic and a twinge of a sore throat. it's at the point where i know that if i don't get a decent night's sleep, i'll be bedridden for days.

maybe it's my body's roundabout defence mechanism. if i get sick, i won't be able to go into an environment that i loathe with seething fury.

but then i get a nasty e-mail from the supervisor demanding that i am URGENTLY (yes, he used all caps) needed in the lab to try looking at my sample with the white light set-up, an experiment that i pretty much consider futile anyway.

i run for, and miss, the bus to campus.

i finally get to the lab to find that the postdocs are still setting up the experiment. my presence really wasn't so 'urgently' needed after all.

i then spend all afternoon and most of the evening trying to align a 100-micron pinhole to an out-of-focus image of a photonic crystal defect microcavity. without success, mind you. the supervisor unhelpfully makes a battery of suggestions to try, some of which are difficult, if not impossible, to execute. i am exasperated.

my eyes hurt, i am dizzy and i generally feel like the piece of poo that a piece of poo would have pooed.

i haven't eaten yet. at all. i could only stomach a glass of juice this morning before i headed out. now i am waiting for food to thaw so that i can restore my blood sugar level to something that doesn't make me feel like a bag of ass.

today is one of those days i wish i had a hug and someone to tuck me into bed and bring me tea.

pressing the crosswalk button over and over and over and over will make the light turn faster, right?

right!?

god, why do people do that!?

and with elevator buttons, too. you've already pushed the fucking button! pushing it again and again and again isn't going to make the door close faster or the elevator move sooner or your penis any bigger. all it does is wear off the little braille nubbins, leaving the blind with no indication of which floor they're going to.

repeat button-pushers: the bane of western society.

another listed update? heck yes!

i've been altogether too busy/apprehensive about my thesis to post. i'd figured that avoiding blogging would give me one fewer excuse to procrastinate, but the olympics offered a quick replacement. anyway,

1) i saw no fewer than four people wearing 'rage against the machine' t-shirts on monday. what gives? makes me wish i hadn't washed my 'raj against the machine' shirt with the wrong load of laundry, dyeing it all sort of unsightly colours. nobody outside of alberta would get it, though, and it would be especially bizarre for me to wear it on campus, because at the newspaper here, there is an, um, older, much less educated and much less well-spoken raj who frequents the office, submits unstructured drivel to the culture editor and generally makes people uneasy. it's not that he's particularly creepy or anything, though he has been seen urinating into the bushes outside of the building. it's that nobody understands why an elderly man would spend so much time wandering drunk about campus and trying to submit entertainment stories to a student newspaper. it's at once sad and perplexing.

2) my sweetie's gone houseboating. i should be on that houseboat. but i'm not because i'm 'working on my thesis,' or i should be, in any case. i have a week and a half left, and i'm totally shitting my pants. my experiments have produced no useable results thus far and i'm way behind on my writing. i just have no real motivation because i see this degree as utterly inconsequential to me. i'd sent part of a draft to my supervisor, and he's given me zero feedback...yet i'm expected to press on. this next week and a half will probably be the most miserable i've had in a long time. the end is coming both much too slowly and entirely too quickly.

3) paid my $100 deposit so that i could register in my courses for my mpub. i would be more excited about it -- and i am excited -- if it weren't for this fucking thesis hanging over my head. i got my full registration package in the mail about a week ago and the courses look so promising. the program looks like exactly what i want. what i need, jesus. i've had it with hating my work and the institution i work for. it's a completely fresh start in an utterly new direction, and i cannot wait to begin:

-editorial theory and practice: covers acquisitions, fiction editing, stylistic edting, magazine editing, copy editing and editing biographies, memoirs and even children's books. there's also discussion of editorial responsibility and ethics.

-design and production control in publishing: design theory, typography, production techniques...

-text and context: operation and developing trends in the Canadian publishing industry including government policy and international trade. discussion of scholarly journals as well (right up my alley).

4) canada is sucking up the old suck-box at the summer olympics, as we always seem to do. this olympiad seems particularly trying, though. so many near-misses. it's a good thing toronto didn't get 2008, 'cause that would make our current performance mighty embarassing. do i have the right to judge the athletics program in this country considering that i spend the vast majority on my time on my ass in front of either a computer or a television screen? not really, especially since i do think there are perhaps more pressing causes that the government should consider funding. there's the argument that a good athletic performance could inspire one's countrymen to get off their couches and get active, but that's pretty much horseshit as we can clearly see that the fattest country in the world is also leading in the medals. evidently, the fat people just expect the fit people to exercise for them.

5) it's been pretty cool sharing a living space with dmac for the past week. reassures me that my experiences with cheryl and her overfed cat were largely soured by her and not because i'm somehow inherently incompatible with roommates. we made sweet potato gnocchi on saturday and both wrote something for the upcoming MOMpop zine. we'd been itching to go pick blackberries, but the weather has thus far been uncooperative.

6) oh yeah: homemade watermelon-raspberry sorbet kicks some serious ass.

i have more to say, but i should also get to work. stay tuned for updates featuring characters MT, flaglar, PK and ND.

i've always thought that the pale blush-pink watermelon flesh was pretty inert and generally innocuous, compared to, say, the tenacious deep purple of blackberry juice, but it turns out that watermelon stains like a son of a bitch. the previously white components of my blender pitcher and lid are now apparently permanently dyed with patches of stubborn pink. not that i really mind at all. i just never expected watermelon juice to be the persistent type.

tonight, we try watermelon-raspberry sorbet with the ice cream maker. fingers crossed...

the watermelon-raspberry mixture used to make the sorbet is a rather tasty concoction in and of itself. i figure worse comes to worst, we could probably just drink it straight.

blaaaaarrrp!

one of my sweetie's family dogs just threw up on our carpet.

twice.

synchronized diving.

um, why?

i should stop watching the olympics and go to bed.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that it became the 15th at midnight.

see, my u-pass goes into effect on the 15th. but the cranky driver of the 12:35 bus leaving UBC wouldn't let me use it. i slid it into the machine and heard the reassuring high-pitched 'beep!'

he shook his head. 'not for today,' he says.

'but it's the 15th.'

'not for today,' he repeats. 'tomorrow.'

'but...'

he continued shaking his head. i relented and paid the two bucks.

hail to the bus driver my ass.

**

i promised a work-related rant a few days ago, i know. i've been too busy to rant, and i think i may have descended from frothing rage to mild annoyance, so the rant wouldn't really capture the intensity of that particular day. oh well. i may tell about it yet.

i wish i could play beach volleyball. well.

previously frozen bananas quite possibly have the most disgusting texture these hands have ever felt. *shudder*

inaugural run of the ice cream maker, you see. i hope it works out 'cause i am having guests over, gerry being one of them.

it's really peculiar having him live in the same building yet having to dial all ten digits to call him at home. it feels like i should just be able to dial a four-digit extension or something.

i had the most annoying day yesterday. i'll rant about it a bit later.

i am eagerly anticipating the two-hour finale of what i consider one of the most brilliant and underappreciated shows currently on television: joe schmo.

now, i'll admit that when i first heard about the show's premise, having some dude participate in what he thinks is a reality show which is just an elaborate scripted plot with actors, i thought it was going to be dumb and mean. but season one turned out to be an incredibly entertaining tongue-in-cheek parody of crappy-ass reality shows like survivor, big brother and paradise hotel

what i think i liked most about it was that it was at nobody's real expense. although the 'schmo' wasn't necessarily portrayed as the brightest bulb on the tree, the show certainly never made fun of him, and the editing made him out to be a down-to-earth honest guy. it was good times.

tonight, we see the end of season two, a parody of those vomit-inducing bachelor-type shows. the season started off a bit sluggishly, but picked up momentum as one of the two schmos figured it out and the producers flipped her to the actors' camp. the dialogue is full of inflammatory double-entendres, and the cast of characters is a host of stereotypical reality-show caricatures in outrageous situations that push the bounds of credibility, only demonstrating how utterly contrived 'acutal' reality shows really are.

the producers had a stroke of brilliance, though, when they cast jonathan 'street-cents' torrens (i know, everyone knows him from jonovision, but i remember him as the host of the children's consumer awareness program that i watched religiously until it got really, i mean, really, lame) as an ambiguously gay suitor. i'm sure they must have boosted their canadian viewership ten-fold with that move. not that that really means all that much.

anyway, i'm extremely bored right now in the lab and i'm cursing the fact that i still have over three hours to wait before i can indulge in what i initially thought would just be a secret guilty pleasure, but is actually, i've come to realize, completely guilt-free.

my sweetie may be on vacation without me, but i just ate 4 (four!) homemade bacon-wrapped sea scallops, an awesome squid salad with fresh mixed greens, cucumber, red radish and dressed with olive oil and lime juice and yummy rosemary bread.

try getting that for $16 anywhere else...

so, so full.

yum.

s/he <-- i hate that.

it's peppered throughout an article that the physics journal's new english editor wrote. i want to be able to tell him 'that's not the way things are done' so that i can avoid putting it into this issue of the journal, which, incidentally, is turning out to be quite the piece of crap already, but i can't find guidelines on it either in the canadian press stylebook or the chicago manual of style, possibly because i simply don't really know where to look.

can someone help me out here?

no time to post for the past several days. hence, read as i spew forth random garbage i'd wanted to say over the last week:

1) i have exactly one more month in the lab. that scares the shit out of me, especially since my past three marathon sessions with the lasers have yielded zero results. which is why i can't go on...

2) vacation. my sweetie is currently kayaking to quadra island (more on this later), the first of his two vacations he's taking this month. the second is the houseboating trip on the shuswaps at the end of the month that we have been planning since february. it turns out, however, that i won't be going, thanks to thesis work. ah well, at least dmac will be here. i'll *ahem* write my thesis in between olympic events.

3) my sweetie, as mentioned, is kayaking to quadra island. great time for it to rain, after an absolutely parched summer to date. i am reasonably concerned about his safety, but i know there was nothing i could do to convince him not to go. he's promised me he'll wear his PFD and not to take any unnecessary risks, so i'm not apoplectically worried. Still, i find it slightly unsettling that i have to wait three or four days to make sure he's okay.

i know he'll be fine -- he's probably right that driving or biking to work every day is perhaps a greater risk. i made the mistake, though, of letting his kayak plan slip to his mother, and then: pandemonium. the news sent her into a frantic fretful tizzy, and there was very little i could do to calm her. she and the father-in-law freaked and looked up all sort of 'kayak death' articles and sent them, not to my sweetie, but to me, in the hopes that i would convince him to wait to kayak until he can get people to accompany him. they sent him a kayak safety and rescue book (which arrived the day he left, conveniently leaving him no time to read it even if he wanted to). for the past week, my sweetie has been trying to find various ways to reassure his inconsolable parents and has been getting quite, quite frustrated in the process. anyway, i've learned from my mistake: never tell the in-laws anything.

4) who buys comedy CDs? really, who? i'm not judging here -- i just don't know anyone who watches a stand-up routine and says, hey, that dude's pretty funny. i think i'll buy his CD. and, how many times can you actually listen to a comedy CD before it's no longer amusing?

5) ah, the dishwasher. the kitchen appliance in our new pad that my sweetie was so looking forward to. see, i never had a dishwasher, so i never really longed for it. but oh, it's going to be so nice, he says. he's never had dishes come out of the dishwasher dirty, he says. it's so much better than handwashing, he says. he was awaiting the dishwasher with so much anticipation that he made himself an advent calendar of sorts: a month-long countdown scrawled on his olsen twins calendar.

so, our first attempt to use this piece of machinery came wednesday. it's just a dishwasher, right? it can't be that hard. besides, my sweetie's known to be more than competent in such technical matters.

'this is perplexing,' he says after playing with it for about ten minutes. 'most dishwashers i've ever used just have the setting and a button that you can switch to "on".'

our dishwasher has this set of four buttons with cryptic pictograms that, as far as i can tell, mean nothing, and a knob with no explicit 'on' or 'off' positions. the first time my sweetie tried to use the dishwasher, both the prewash and the main detergent dispenser opened right away, which, i guess, isn't supposed to happen. it took him until the next day to he figure out that, okay, the inner two pictogram buttons need to be pushed in, and the knob turned clockwise to initiate the fucking machine. why? who knows? and no, we weren't left the manual for this thing.

he ran the machine without detergent once and with thereafter, when he verified that the dishwasher was actually operational when that nonsensical algorithm was put into play. then he left to go kayaking. when i came home (at 2:30 am -- thanks a lot, fucking photonic crystal arrays) yesterday, i tried unloading the dishwasher, to find:

a) a glass literally full of water on the top shelf

b) a cake pan with cake still stuck to it

c) a bent and half-melted straw

d) wet cutlery with food now incredibly stuck on.

now i get to rewash several of the dishes by hand, and since they've had food baked on by the ol' dishwasher, it'll be extra-fun.

6) rick james died. huh.

7) how much you wanna bet that 'the exorcist: the beginning' will be a smelly fibrous piece of poo?

ow... my cleaning arm hurts...

i hope not to have to move again in an extremely long time.

this past all-too-short long weekend was spent scrubbing, packing, moving, unpacking... we have so much crap. it's amazing how moving up two floors takes virtually the same amount of work as moving across town. our cleaning was also doubled by virtue of the fact that the previous owners of our new place weren't forced to clean the suite whereas, as vacating renting tenants, we were obligated to clean the old place. not that the owners left us with a sty or anything, but all of the shelves had to be wiped down before we could unpack.

i also spent about four hours cleaning the oven in our old suite and eight hours cleaning everything else. i defrosted the fridge, an action which led to a disgusting puddle of rusty water inundating the kitchen. i've talked to the property managers about what a piece of garbage the fridge is and with any hope, gerry and smorg can get a new one out of it.

we figured that we may as well take the opportunity to get some more shelving and furniture so that our books wouldn't be a disheveled mess in the new place. my sweetie spent saturday acquiring a new bookshelf, filing cabinet and wardrobe with SW's car and help. we were still trying to put together the BRANÄS (<-- swedish for 'piece of crap') wicker baskets at about 1:30 in the morning, hammering in stubborn plastic bolts that refused to go anywhere. we didn't realize that we actually shared a wall with our neighbour in the corner apartment, and after an hour of hammering, we hear BAM! BAM! BAM! from the other side of the wall. uh... we desisted immediately, of course, but now it's become this game of strategic avoidance; i stand behind the door and listen to see if the neighbour is coming or going, in which case i wait until he or she is out of the hallway before venturing out. i figure i'll be doing this for at least the next couple of months until the incident is forgotten. am i being paranoid? absolutely. but i can't afford to make -- or confront -- enemies so early in my tenancy. sunday saw the amazing adventure of us trying to get our queen-sized boxspring upstairs to the bedroom. turns out the distance between the stairs and the ceiling above the stairs is substantially shorter than the width of the boxspring. we tried pretty much every orientation and in each case the boxspring would jam into the drywall. 'i can repair holes in drywall,' says my sweetie. 'let's just try to get this thing up.' we now have a boxspring-shaped dent in the drywall above the stairs, where we'd wedged the boxspring to the point where it became apparent that there was absolutely no way to get it all the way up the stairs. you'd think that queen-sized mattresses are common enough that buildings would be designed with that in mind. anyway, we ended up hauling the boxspring with a climbing rope up the side of the building and onto the roof, then through our door to the rooftop patio. i was on the ground pulling to make sure the boxspring didn't crash into the building's windows while my sweetie hand-over-handed the thing up. some dude on the roof did ask, 'uh, just out of curiosity, what are you doing?'

'hauling up a boxspring.'

'oh. um, carry on.'

i spent most of yesterday cleaning up the old suite in time for this morning's move-out inspection. there are so many places that you don't even think about cleaning regularly. the undersides of kitchen cabinets, for instance, which, after two years, end up being rather repulsive. i also used an entire mr. clean magic eraser scrubbing marks off of the walls. it actually works quite well, but i guess that's the unfortunate consequence of these 'new cleaning technologies': now that they're on the market, you're expected to use them. at least i'll be getting all of my security deposit back.

currently, our new suite is a mess of scattered random boxes. our kitchen is hopelessly disorganized, and it'll take me a few days to figure out where to put most of the items that had been stowed in our previously abundant closet space.

it's strange: i still feel like i'm sleeping in a bed & breakfast. without the breakfast.

should i be more patient with chinese immigrants who can't speak english?

probably, seeing as i was born to two of them.

there's this chinese grad student in my lab whose english is pretty shit-poor. to his credit, he's trying to learn the language, but the problem is that he doesn't understand some basic instructions, which, in a laser lab, can be rather hazardous. it's also hard to ascertain sometimes whether he does something because he doesn't understand the language, or because he's just plain socially inept. he is, after all, a physicist. he seems incredibly reliant on one of our lab's postdocs, who appears to have infinite patience. i both admire the postdoc's unflinching and unwavering commitment to help this putz out and am so, so grateful that i'm not in his position.

this chinese grad student -- known around the lab as 'sky' -- appears not to have learned my name, despite having worked in the same lab for a good six months. it takes about 10 times as long to get a concept across to him, and i'm not talking complicated physics-type concepts. concepts like, 'uh, you're not supposed to go into the laser lab without safety goggles. these. gog-gles. you must wear. wear goggles. no wear, then burn eyes out. gog-gles.'

anyway, i had a phone conversation with sky that went as follows:

'hello, nanolab. nori speaking.'

'enh... hello.'

'hi.'

'enh... is murray...enh...there?'

'nope.'

'enh... not there?'

'no. he's gone.'

'enh... gone?'

'yes. gone. he isn't here.'

'enh...who is this?'

'it's nori.'

'enh...are you murray's...enh...friend?'

(???) 'um...i guess so.'

'enh...is he...enh...will he come back?'

'i don't know. but i don't think so. his bike isn't here.'

'enh...bike? oh. enh...murray not come back.'

'no, i don't think so. i think he's gone home.'

'enh...home? okay. bye-bye.'

i hang up. twenty minutes later, he barges into the lab sans goggles and asks if murray's here. does he think that repeatedly asking will make it so?

apparently, as my sweetie's told me he's witnessed sky trying to fax a document to a number which was evidently wrong, and sky's strategy was just to keep faxing it to that number multiple times.

...

then he sends this e-mail out to the entire department. the whole department (this is totally unedited):

Sorry for bothering all of you,
      Now I am a graduate student working on nanostructure fabrication in AMPEL.This project will use a combination of a AFM and a borescope. But I don't know much about borescopes. It would be useful to make me get some information such as working distance, magnification, resolution etc., in advance, because I need to see a very tiny pattern on SOI surface, around a order of 7~8 microns, to be imaged with this sort of thing.
      Please tell me if you konw Who has such tiny device and where I can take a look? Thanks
Tian Si
Physics & Astronomy Department

my buddy SW writes an e-mail to a small group of us as follows:

To everyone@everydepartment.ubc.ca:
Sorry for bothering all of you,
Now I am a graduate student working on my thesis.  I don't know much about what I am doing.  It would be useful to make me get some information on what I'm doing such as doing some work, looking things up in books, on the internet, this sort of thing.
Please tell me if you know who will do all my work for me.
Thanks
Scott Webster

genius.

...

in other news, it's 0428h and i'm in my lab. it'd be a bit better if i were getting results, but after a frustrating day of one delay after another, i'm getting jack shit. it'll make the supervisor happy, i'm sure. i'm not entirely sure why the system's not behaving itself -- all i know is that i'm really really tired. after our spectrometer computer got devastated by a virus, the supervisor's all paranoid about connecting it to the network. i am without internet during scans, when i need it most. it was most likely some dumbass downloading a corrupt attachment to begin with. just having it hooked up to the internet isn't all that big a risk.

that computer has to work on windows NT 4.0 (shittiest...operating...system...ever.) because the software used to operate the spectrometer is hopelessly antiquated and won't work on anything more contemporary. as a result, the system is full of security holes and susceptible to viruses of all types.

it never ceases to astound me how backward this lab is. really. cutting-edge photonic crystal research, right here.

"uh...you don't have a toaster?"

about a year ago, i took a telephone survey which ended up being about the brands of my kitchen appliances. i'm pretty sure the survey administrator wasn't supposed to sound so incredulous, but suffice it to say that i don't have that many appliances. several of them were gifts, but i honestly don't have any that i don't use at least once or twice a month, which is pretty good, judging from the multiple pressure cookers and other wacky kitchen gadgets in my grandmother-in-law's basement. still, though, i don't have a toaster. i don't eat toast that often, although i might eat more of it if i had a toaster. for now, i get by with singeing the bread on my george foreman grill.

i indulged today by buying myself a couple of housewarming appliances -- neither of which is a toaster -- but i'm now a proud owner of an ice cream maker. and a blender.

ooh, i can almost taste the blackberry sorbet!

my consolation for the hassle of moving and cleaning. yep. that's my justification.

get out of my dreams...

...and into my car...

i had a dream last night: thomas was in it, but he was black.

it smells like someone really scared a skunk outside our building. maybe it was the fumes wafting through the window that triggered the dream.

what does it all mean?

well, thomas -- it seems that skunk spray = you are black.

word.

i still can't believe martha stewart compared prison to camping and herself to nelson mandela. she may as well have compared herself to jesus. the only way she would have offended more people...

ugh...
 
two short hours after showering and i already officially feel sweaty and gross again. curse this humid weather...

today, i ate:
 
a large piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk for breakfast...
 
three slices of canteloupe for "lunch"...
 
another slice of canteloupe, a freybe pepperoni, two fried eggs and five grape tomatoes for supper...
 
i am going to die.

despite my doubts, the MOMpop interdependence zine turned out much better than i'd anticipated.
 
i was on collating duty last night, where six of us accomplished more in less time than the twenty or so bodies at the collating party for the first issue. anyway, last saturday saw a few of us gather at AW's to try to come up with content for this thing. it seemed like we all had the same problem: the concept of interdependence was just a bit too nebulous and vague to conjure up anything that didn't seem either ridiculously obvious or incredibly contrived.
 
in the end, there was a collection of random mediocre art. the way it was put together, though, is pretty good. i mean, it is a zine, so we're not really demanding particularly high standards, but all in all, it's a lot better than i'd expected. there's a page on lichens, a page on symbiosis, and, yes, plenty of random art, but it's kinda funky. my favourite is the poem that cori wrote:
 

haiku needs poet

poet needs verse to exist

interdependent

 
today's MOMpop is supposed to be a picnic, so HT and we're going to pick up some groceries before heading over. it'll be fun: pedal-powered sound, dancing, picnic... i'll try to remember my sunscreen this time.

there's a new commercial out for tampax compak -- you know, the tampons that are so discreet, only you know it's a tampon? a dude is waiting for his date to finish getting ready. he gets peckish (oh, get your mind out of the gutter) and starts asking her if he can have a cookie, then a sandwich, and then a candy as he picks up the tampon in its wrapper.

see? it's so discreet, your date may mistake it for a sugary confection.

how the fuck is this a good thing!?

why is it that girls are made to believe that they even need to be discreet?

i certainly don't flaunt it when i get my period, but i don't pussyfoot around it, either. i'm not ashamed of pulling a pad or a tampon out of my bag when i need a change. on the other hand, i don't celebrate it like it's some sort of empowering goddess phenomenon that somehow makes women the superior sex -- i hate the wrenching pain of cramps and the mood swings and the grossness -- but it's a natural part of having the double-x chromosomes, not a monthly breakout of herpetic lesions...

gross.

about five weeks ago -- about when the laser broke and i stayed home to "work on my thesis" -- i started playing my guitar regularly: every day for about an hour a day. the first week was agony because the tension in my strings is entirely too high and i hadn't played that particular guitar in a while. after the week, though, i'd developed an impressive set of callouses. asbestos fingers. the strings didn't cut into my flesh anymore.

when smorg and gerry visted, though, i didn't play. for three days. just three days of not playing and a brief brining in the ocean by wreck beach, and my resilient finger pads just kind of fell off. now i have these rough patches of dead skin on my fingertips that are kind of peeling off and getting caught on stuff. it's irritating and frustrating. it feels like i've just squandered five weeks of dedicated callous-building.

interestingly enough, it looks like the area under my finger pads doesn't actually have fingerprint ridges. maybe now's the time to commit those homicides i've been planning.

i've been rather negligent in updating, opting instead to attempt to be something of a decent host for visiting smorg and gerry. their trip out to the coast was initially scheduled to be a house-hunting endeavour, but, being that they have officially signed to take over our current place, they were able take it easy and spend some time seeing the city.

sunday saw us hitting virtually every shoe store on robson -- and there are a lot of shoe stores on robson -- in search of casual but professional footwear for smorg (no luck) taking a brief stop in chinatown to procure some barbecue duck and chinese broccoli for dinner, and spending a couple of hours on wreck beach, where, among numerous boobs and penises, i saw the nude jockocracy try to pick up two chicks, one of whom clearly had implants, and some crazy dude wearing only a headdress and a belt came up to us and declared that men would one day be having babies. i love vancouver.

on monday, our guests went and signed the lease agreement for our suite and they took an excursion with my sweetie to the PNE's playland, an outdoor amusement park. i was too immersed in work and generally exhausted to go, but was treated to a story upon their return of my sweetie brutalising a twelve year-old in the bumper cars for jumping the rather extensive queue and generally being an indignant little fart. my sweetie seems rather proud of this, though any acknowledgement of this from me could only be interpreted as encouragement.

yesterday, smorg and gerry treated us to a thai dinner, before we dragged them both to what ended up being an incredibly lengthy city council public meeting, where, inspiringly enough, local kits residents proved themselves much more passionate and much less apathetic than their yuppie bo-bo images tend to imply, arguing fervently against a proposed home depot that may constructed three blocks from our apartment. the speakers' list ballooned to over 90 people, and at 11 pm last night, council only managed to get through a third of them. they resumed tonight, and are apparently still in session.

smorg and gerry left for edmonton this morning, leaving us with some of their possessions (including christmas gift wrap!?) that are really and finally driving home the fact that i am actually going to be moving, and in less than a month.

....

it rained last night and i could hear it both through my closed window as well as through the bedroom door and the open patio door. it made me wonder whether i'll be able to get used to the sound of rain directly pelting the roof and window directly above the bed in our new place.

...

the upcoming MOMpop (17 july) is putting together its zine this saturday. its theme is interdependence: living together and relying on one another. i'd like to make one or two contributions to this issue, but am currently devoid of any insights. ideas?

the more i see them, the more i resent how utterly imbecilic those women in the schick intuition commercials are portrayed to be. nobody has that much trouble shaving. the very existence of this supposedly revolutionary razor does nothing but infantilise women. dumb.

there's nothing grosser than, when eating, picking up a wayward crumb and putting it in your mouth just to realize that it is decidedly not food.

...

i was watching the next generation today instead of working on my thesis and the preposterousness of data (um, the character) really struck me.

as an aside, my sweetie's absurd first-year philosophy prof once used data as a demonstration of the fact that artificial intelligence exists -- no joke.

anyway, i was watching a mediocre TNG episode where a prisoner was talking to data and asked 'why do you have yellow eyes?' to which he replied 'i am an android.'

now, it seems to me that emulating the skin tone and eye colour of a normal human being is perhaps the easiest aspect of constructing an android. yeah, i know they made brent spiner wear all of that cake make-up to distinguish him from other characters and characterize him as a machine, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. what, they didn't have any flesh-coloured paint when they put him together?

you know what i'm sayin'?

...

two...more...months...

pigfuckers.

some pigfuckers ripped off my sweetie's bike tonight. they took his handlebars, his stem, his pedals, his cranks and his seat. on a fucking BMX!

who the fuck would want to pay for or use the ratty old seat and the worn and sticky handlebars anyway?

he's on his way home now, by bus, if it's even still running.

why do people have to be such giant smelly shit-encrusted assholes?

after voting in the canadian national election today, i discovered a renewed sense of incredulous befuddlement at how the american election of 2000, especially the florida recount, could have gone so, so incredibly wrong.

remember how it took, like, two weeks for the official results to be announced? two weeks for the recount in one state? in unprecedented, the revealing documentary about how florida disenfranchised thousands of people -- most of them blacks -- the filmmakers discussed the negative impact of the confusing butterfly ballot. confusing!? fucking retarded, was what it was. the voters had to punch holes for a candidate on a convoluted list of staggered and alternating names. most of the voters -- the ones who were allowed to vote -- didn't even know whom they were voting for, and sometimes the hole punch didn't go all the way through and was never registered.

today, as i cast my ballot, i took a moment to revel in its beautiful simplicity: a list of candidates; you use a pencil to mark an x by the name of the candidate for whom you would like to vote. x. that's it. no hole-punching, no lever-pulling...the ballots are handcounted, but that's a pretty self-explanatory process.

during the american election debacle, my buddy JH remarked that it took four hours to count all of the ballots in canada when chrétien scored his threepeat; with a population ten times canada's, wouldn't it just take at most 40 hours to recount all of the ballots in the country, let alone those from a single state of geriatrics?

in november, the ambitious americans are tryin' out those crazy new-fangled electronic voting machines. let's see how far up shit creek they get this time 'round. do they think that implementing a new and barely tested (not to mention utterly unnecessary) technology somehow makes their brand of democracy superior? give me a golf pencil and a simple list of names any day.

...

in other news, go see napoleon dynamite. D&A treated us to it on their stop in town before embarking on their alaskan cruise and it's incredibly, dysfunctionally, hilarious.

also: i just fucked up my sweetie's rubik's cube. he took the news really well.

still squinting...

i picked up my laptop from compusmart yesterday. on thursday, the dude said on the phone that someone would likely call me before 11 am. i waited until 2 pm and finally called them. the technician says 'oh yeah. i had a hard time reaching you. the phone number here doesn't seem to work.'

FUH-UCK. did i not specifically call them up and tell them to change the errant phone number and verify on a subsequent call that the phone number was corrected?

anyway, as i suspected, the inverter needs replacing. $61 for the part, which actually isn't so bad. i'm just worried how much the labour costs will end up being...

they're supposed to call me when the part comes in -- they say monday or tuesday of next week. i suspect that i will have to call them on wednesday afternoon. *sigh*

...

i'm not as sore as i'd expected to be after yesterday's two-hour critical mass ride. it was pretty big -- i'm sure they got at least 600 people out -- but i don't have an official count and it felt a bit smaller than last year. i'm tellin' ya: there were lots of beautiful people at the ride.

the crowd was big enough to take over cambie bridge entirely. the police actually helped us out with a car on either end guiding the route and blocking traffic. i don't remember them being there last year.

as usual, though, there were the angry honking motorists and the supportive honking motorists. sometimes it's hard to tell which category they fall into if you can't see their faces. generally, the supporters give out a series of short meep-meep-meeeeeeps while the disgruntled drivers lean meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnh. we had a passenger in one of those fucking stretch-UVs (you know what i'm talkin' about), lean out the window, waving and smiling at us.

some just have no appreciation for irony.

friday, 18 june 2004: massive windstorms in the lower mainland knock out power from the fraser valley all the way up to downtown vancouver.

probably as a result, the backlighting on nori's laptop screen ceases to function properly.

nori calls toshiba's call centre. man who can't speak english tries to convince nori that the laptop was purchased in america and that she would have to have it repaired in the states. the man does not understand that alberta and british columbia are in canada. nori tries explaining the problem to the man. the man does not grasp the hardware failure and tries to get nori to adjust the screen settings on her computer to no avail. nori finally asks where she can take the computer to have it repaired, and the man lists off three addresses, compusmart in downtown vancouver being one such toshiba-affiliated service shops.

saturday, 19 june 2004: nori calls compusmart. punk on the other end of the line is patronizing and rude. tells nori to bring the machine in and that parts and repairs will take four working days. nori must wait for realtor to deliver documents and cannot leave the house. asks punk for the store's hours.

sunday, 20 june 2004: compusmart is closed. nori discovers that if she shines a bright lamp on the screen, she can still sort of work on the computer. she works, squinting.

monday, 21 june 2004: nori drops off laptop at compusmart and tells dude at the counter her contact information. she pays a $45 deposit. dude at the counter says 'when the problem is diagnosed, someone will call you. this will take two days.'

'if you need to order parts, can i reclaim the computer and work on my thesis while we wait for the parts to come in?'

'sure. sign this waiver that says if anything else goes wrong with your computer, we aren't responsible.'

...

tuesday, 22 june 2004: nori looks at the work order form and discovers that her phone number was mistyped. nori calls compusmart and has them fix the error. nori verifies that nobody had attempted to call the wrong number.

wednesday, 23 june 2004: compusmart does not call.

thursday, 24 june 2004: nori calls compusmart in the morning. dude says 'someone will look at it today and a technician will call you this afternoon with a diagnosis of the problem.'

'this afternoon?'

'yes. this afternoon.'

thursday afternoon arrives. nobody calls. 20 minutes prior to closing, nori calls compusmart. 'what's up with my computer? i was told i'd be called this afternoon.'

'let me check. oh. yeah. they haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but it's next on the list (nori rolls her eyes). they'll call you tomorrow with a diagnosis.'

'you have any idea when?'

'you could try calling at about 11.'

*YAAAAAAAAARRRGH!*

nori heads to campus, a 25-minute bus ride, for the sole purpose of checking her e-mail and venting on this blog.

...

if it's going to take 5 days to make a fucking diagnosis, tell me it's going to take 5 days. don't say 'someone'll call you in 2 days,' have nobody call me, then tell me someone'll call me in the afternoon when i finally have to call, then NOT CALL! i understand if something's taking longer than expected to fix, but they should have phoned me and said 'hey, it's gonna take another couple of days' instead of having me stay at home waiting for a call that ultimately never comes!

this tale of frustration continues tomorrow.