i really dig this new snowboard cross event at the olympics. totally telegenic.

it seems all i ever do on this blog is whine, but when things are going well, it usually means i'm too preoccupied to post.

today, i am feeling listless. i really have no legitimate reason to feel this way, but it's been creeping up on my for the last several weeks. i've never had so much free time before, and i don't really know what to do with it. perhaps this is why housewives have babies.

honestly, i miss being a student. i miss having everything i do count toward some ultimately affirming goal. i miss the bonding between commiserating classmates. i didn't realize it could happen, but it has: somehow, my life has gotten even more pedestrian than it used to be. when i talk to people now, i have nothing exciting to report. "well, i'm working on a hockey book." "yeah?" "uh-huh." and that's it.

the tiresome winds are making the tree outside my window brush incessantly across the glass. it's almost enough to make me seasick just looking at it.

ugh. do i ever need to do something with my life. i mean, something beyond my 8:30-to-4:30 job. i need to start volunteering or something. now that i've cut down on freelancing and quit the physics journal, i need some other bandwagon to jump on. something i can feel genuinely good about. i am on a selfish quest for a cause; my soul is ravenous.

"The right way to use TAMPAX tampons and other helpful hints about absorbency

...

•Always remove your used tampon before inserting a new one
•Be sure to remove the last tampon you use at the end of your period"

***
i love this. the fact that TAMPAX had to include these rather ridiculously obvious instructions tells me that somewhere, at some point, some poor doctor had to pull, like, 5 three-week-old fetid rotting tampons out of an ailing woman, whose family ended up suing the tampon manufacturer.

i say this all the time, but honestly: what kind of retard...?

as much as i hate to break out the "emotional rollercoaster" cliché, i'm afraid no other metaphor will describe my past two weeks, which have absolutely exhausted me.

on top of that, my confidence in my abilities as an editor have been shaken to the core. it'll take me a while to get back to the point where i'm not second-guessing absolutely everything i do.

last week was supposed to be totally awesome. my company had posted a permanent position for assistant editor, and--predictably--i applied for it. my sweetie was convinced it was a position the firm made just for me to keep me around, but i didn't want to be too optimistic and set myself up for disappointment.

i'd also gotten my master of publishing approved by two of my committee members. all i had to do was get the third--my industry supervisor--to read and approve it. it was nerve-wracking enough prodding her to do it when she already had her plate piled high; then she reads it and says she should run it by the publisher to make sure he's okay with what i say about him. this is what doomed last year's intern to academic purgatory: she'd finished her report, and the boss didn't like what she wrote about him and he refused to let her get her degree.

it was down to the wire, but my industry superviros finally agreed to sign my approval form, and i was all ready to collect my second master's degree.

i schlep all the way up the moutain to burnaby, drop off my thesis, then come back into town to find a message in my e-mail with the subject line "project report mistake" from my advisor.

fuck.

turns out i'd incorrectly identified one of my committee members as an assitant professor (which was what he was listed as on the fucking program website) when he was actually an instructor. for that i had to get new forms signed--this coming just a couple of hours before my industry supervisor was leaving for a week in london, to return five days after the deadline for thesis submission.

retarded, no? also, my advisor told me it was a good thing i was submitting this year and not last year, 'cause last year they would have insisted that all of the signatures be in black ink. WTF? doesn't blue ink make it easier to identify an original?

anyway, friday was supposed to be awesome, and it completely fizzled.

i had my interview for the position at the firm on thursday, and it did not go so well. in fact, they had to pull me into a follow up on friday asking me if i really wanted the job, 'cause apparently i didn't give them the impression that i did. one of the editors is still sort of being weird about it. they said i had to work on little knit-picky things like serial commas. and that's one of the things i thought i was actually good at.

and the managing editor said she wasn't going to get back to me about the job until maybe the 22nd.

it got worse when the production manager came over and pointed out that i'd fucked up the price of a book in cover copy that i wrote--that it had gone to the printer that way. fortunately, one of the other editors caught it before it went to press, but everything i do's pretty tentative right now, and that's when a person makes the most mistakes...

upside is, i got the job. i start january, but i have a three-month probationary period during which time i can get fired at any point without notice. i'm totally on eggshells at work right now, and it looks like i'll be until the end of march.

sigh. i only have three days of work next week, luckily, then i have a break. which i so need.

fortunately, there are some in the firm who are just so incredible and supportive. it buoys me that there are those who value my contributions, but it's the people who doubt me that get to me the most, especially when they're people i respect.

anyway, i should stop whining. i'm just ridiculously tired and facing an insurmountable mountain of work. i've got a job and i think i've got my master's degree, so it's all good, right?

i've lost my credit-card-fraud virginity.

someone stole my two credit cards and made obscene purchases at future shop. fortunately, the credit card companies reported suspicious activity and are sending me new cards. i guess it's lucky i didn't have anything else taken from my wallet, though now i have to put a flag on my credit file in case my identity's been stolen.

also, i'd still very much like to punch whoever took my cards in the teeth.

still in recovery...

instead of eating turkey and stuffing like normal people, my sweetie decided that the thing to do thanksgiving weekend was to take a kayak trip out by the discovery islands and harvest shellfish. see, oysters aren't any good in the summer because they spawn and get all gross -- october's allegedly when they start building a glycogen supply to live through the winter and actually get sweet. he'd made me promise a couple of months ago that i'd keep thanksgiving weekend free to go get oysters.

i had misgivings from the get-go, but i assumed we'd be camping at quadra island, head down to rebecca spit and pick up oysters from the beach at low tide. i thought we'd be out there for two of the three days, come home and get rested up and cleaned up for work on the monday. then i found out we'd be kayaking. and that we'd stay out all three days. and that low tide was at about 4am plus or minus an hour each of those nights. and that we weren't going on some romantic getaway -- a girl from his lab and s&a would be joining us.

i told him i didn't think i could go. the timing was shit. the weather had already turned rainy, i was supposed to write my thesis, and i was likely to be hitting the peak of PMS on the trip. i was going to freeze my ass off, i told him.

then he got all sad and whined about me promising to go. he tried to tell me i'd enjoy the trip and that it'd be good for me.

i relented, telling him that to make up for lost time on my thesis, he'd have to take care of stuff at home before and after the trip so that i could work. after two ferry rides interrupted by a two-hour drive from nanaimo to campbell river, we arrived at herriot bay, where we set up camp, had the last civilized meal we'd be having for several days, then headed out at about midnight to harvest shellfish. we filled our quota of oysters and dug for clams, then headed back to the campsite where a crazy and presumably drunk man was having a fit about a chess game or something. the noise, the cold, and my thermarest, which is not made with a lady's curvatures in mind, made for a rough night's sleep.

we set off on our kayaks the next morning, after numerous hours of dillydallying. the first ninety minutes were fine; we arrived on a tiny wooded island; the largest of an ostensible archipelago of rocks, several of which featured fattened seals in poses that might be considered sultry if they were human. their blubber rippled as they launched themselves with their bellies into the water, where they seemed considerably more elegant and cute. we ate a lunch of oysters at our wooded island; my first mistake (after agreeing to go on this trip) may have been that oysters were pretty much all i ate. most of us cut ourselves shucking the damn things; the wound i made with my oyster knife is still festering away on my ring finger now. although the oysters were quite fresh and delicious on their way down, let me tell you that i wasn't terribly fond of them on their way back up...

after lunch, we launched into a bleakly cold paddle against the wind toward an island but without a specific destination in mind. all we knew from my sweetie was that there were "some bays" on the other side of read island that probably have lots of oysters. after two hours of being tossed around on three-foot waves and having the wind chill me to the bone, i began feeling unwell. "we'll just go past that point there and there should be a place to beach."

past the point was an aquaculture operation, which meant that we couldn't harvest within several hundred metres of it. we paddled past the next point. more aquaculture.

this seemingly endless meandering made me feel even more ill, and with about an hour and a half or so before sunset, i lost it and vomitted off the side of the kayak. my sweetie picked up speed to drop me off in a bay where i was supposed to find a decent camping spot while he turned back to find the others and let them know where we'd ended up.

in neoprene boots and carrying an ungainly kayak paddle, i had to amble my way across rocky crags then hack my way through the bush only to find that the grassy area i thought might be a promising campsite was actually an impossibly rocky region next to a stream. meanwhile, the sun was setting, and there was no sign of the others. all i had with me were the extremely wet clothes on my back and a paddle. i climbed over this valley of fallen trees that smelled like rotting garbage and made it to a mossy landing, paced around, and waited. clearly, someone had been there earlier. there were discarded nets and old crab shells. was this person still there? was he going to emerge out of the bushes with a shotgun ordering me off his property?

i was relieved to see kayaks coming around the bend and into the bay just as the sun was setting...but they were sans my sweetie. apparently, when he'd backtracked, he missed them somehow. the others set up their tents while i sat and worried some more. after what seemed like hours, my sweetie paddled back into the bay, exhausted. he charged me with the task of setting up the tent while he pulled the kayak to higher ground. as i put the tentpoles in, one of them snapped catastrophically. we eventually reinforced the break with a piece of aluminum tubing, but it was just yet another thing that went wrong on this trip to make it stressful rather than enjoyable.

we started making food -- stirfried vegetables on couscous -- but after throwing up, it's hard to convince yourself to eat again. i swallowed a few bites and retired to the tent, where i spent another night tossing, aching, and being fucking cold.

the next morning, we harvested oysters from the bay, which was teeming with the creatures because, as we later found out, the land had actually been a shellfish lease, though my sweetie seemed convinced that it had since been abandoned. on our paddle back to our little wood island, we encountered even bigger waves than the day before, and although i'd taken all the steps i could to try to stay dry and warm, believing that being windswept and cold contributed to my seasickness, one of the larger waves came down right over me, running down my neck and drenching my fleece. i didn't throw up that day, but i sure felt like it. i didn't do much paddling, but by the time we got back to the island to set up camp, my thumbs were blistered, and i was cold and broken.

that night was a bit better; at least we could set up the tent in daylight. the island was small enough that we knew there was nobody else and no bears around, and my sweetie built a fire, which i used repeatedly to dry my feet. i only had my neoprene boots, and they were waterlogged. if i took them off to dry my feet, i knew i'd be wet again the moment i had to step into them to go anywhere. with our vegetables going bad, we just dumped everything into a pot and boiled them up with our clams and the remaining couscous, which resulted in a watery soup that would only be acceptable as camping food.

the next morning, we had a fortunately uneventful paddle back to heriot bay. and, as soon as we lifted the kayaks out of the ocean, the sun came out, after hiding behind clouds for the entire weekend. we ate at heriot bay inn that afternoon; we all gorged oursevles, me especially, since i was starving but didn't want to eat too much for fear it'd all come back up.

anyway, we got the 9pm ferry home, which meant that we didn't get to bed until midnight. the next morning, as i attempted to get up for work, i found myself with a cough, a headcold, and achy shoulders and knees.

"next time we go kayaking," my sweetie said to me, "maybe you'll listen to me and get the expensive paddling jacket."

to which i replied -- only partly in jest -- "what the hell makes you think i'll go kayaking with you ever again?"

~sigh~

i'm a bit better now, but i still feel dazed and quite broken. my sweetie is off on an intrepid hike up blacktusk in a couple of weeks.

i'm not going.

holy fuck, i haven't written in a long time.

an update:

two weeks ago, i finally got keys to my workplace. roughly a week ago, i got a real e-mail address (for the summer, i was intern@douglas-mcintyre....). on monday, i got an official title.

now i can introduce myself as an editorial assistant at douglas & mcintyre.

and, i'm making real money. not a lot, but i'm out of the starvation zone.

things are looking up.

***

in other news, my sweetie flew to ottawa last week to reclaim our stuff that had been growing increasingly obsolete for three years in a heated storage facility that charged us about two grand a year. he drove a u-haul cube van all the way back in three days, and up until a few days ago, there was a seven-foot cube of crap sitting in the middle of living room.

one thing about my sweetie that's generally very endearing but incredibly frustrating when it comes to discarding possessions is that he attaches sentimental value to everything he owns. he brought back about eight hundred t-shirts, all of which say something hilarious or are otherwise "cool," and even though we have zero space, he's insisting on keeping them. he's got a back-story for virtually every one of them.

~sigh~

***

i have a little over twenty pages of my internship report written. i'm not supposed to call it a thesis, but calling it an internship report seems to trivialize it some. anyway, it looks like i might have to invoke some serious triple-space action to get it to the requisite sixty pages. my days of student journalism trained me to economize words and be succinct. i just can't ramble or make my prose any more literary. as a result, the report is incredibly short and shit boring to read.

oh well.

i guess the point is just to get enough done so that i can graduate and focus on my job.

i have a job. cool.

back from a week of houseboating, where i spent every day hiking, floating around in the lake, or doing crossword puzzles. a much-needed break following a few months of frenzied hell.

it was refreshing not to have internet access, though i feel a bit out of touch now, having missed the katrina ordeal. when i saw lewis lapham speak at nash in january, i asked him if there was a sense of outrage in the US that the mainstream media was simply ignoring or if there was just no anger whatsoever. there is no outrage, he told me. the american people had gone numb.

well, there's certainly outrage now. a year too late, maybe.

on the houseboat, SW brought along a copy of the walrus, in which i noticed that one of their illustrators, sam, shared the same name as a remarkably gifted artist and genuinely awesome person i knew in high school. at the risk of feeling like a bit of a stalker, i am tempted to get in touch with him. is that weird? just a couple of weeks ago, my sweetie and i were on the bus going home from a party, when a chick approached us and started talking to us. i'd recognized her as the queen bitch from my junior high years, while my sweetie had the misfortune of going to high school with her. she talked to us like we'd always been pals.

when we got off the bus, my sweetie said, "you know, that's the first time she's ever said a word to me."

i felt indignant at her nerve to come speak to me after how mean she was to the nerdy loser girl in junior high. at the same time, i couldn't help but feel that her high school years probably were her best and she was trying to find any excuse to relive them.

anyway, point is, i don't know how a random e-mail from me to sam would be received.

***

one week before starting up again at d&m.

woot!

i wandered into my last week of my internship expecting to slip right into "what are they going to do -- fire me?" mode, but the vp operations called me into a meeting and offered me a 3-month contract to stay on, do editorial work and help set up their central database.

woohoo! i get to put off worrying about unemployment until at least the beginning of 2006. and they're paying me more than twice what i'm getting now as an intern, meaning i don't have to come home every night and do freelance work just to make ends meet. and i have the option of working just four days a week so that i can spend that extra day working on my internship report.

sweeeeeet.

wow, i haven't written in a long time.

this is perhaps because the month of july attempted to kill me.

in addition to working 8 to 4:30 at d&m, i did my ccsp indexing project for my department's anthology and edited an entire book on fluid dynamics. i sent out my invoices two days ago, and discovered that i'd done over $3000 in contract work this month.

and i almost died.

i guess i've discovered the cap on the amount of money i could make as a freelancer. i suppose $2400 a month is a comfortable enough living. also, i probably wouldn't have been in such rough shape if i didn't also have to do internship work.

my internship is coming to an end in about three weeks, which makes me sad. there's a rumour going around that d&m might be initiating a junior editor position. fingers crossed.

my sweetie's gone on a kayak trip with his lab. it's much less nerve-wracking that he's actually going with other people, as opposed to last year, when he made a solo trip to quadra island. still, though, the timing sort of sucks, because this is my first sort of free weekend in over a month.

in a couple of days, i start designing the september issue of the physics journal. i have no idea what the content is going to be like...but i've discovered that i don't really care, which i see as a healthy and overdue step away from student journalism. it'll be good to do design again, though. i've been doing so much editing, i'll need a bit of balance.

until then, though, i'm trying to cram my days with social plans so i can keep my mind off the fact that my sweetie is under constant threat of drowning.

finally.

i'd finished the newsletter redesign for the physics department over a month and a half ago and i just got paid. allegedly, the problem was that the finance department hadn't changed my address since i moved (which was almost a year ago now), and the physics department couldn't enter the data for my cheque to finance before they changed my address.

it's all bullshit, if you ask me. first of all, i moved up two floors. that's a three-digit change in my address. also, i'd filled in a change of address form last august.

i'm pretty sure that it was just a bunch of newbies in the physics department who didn't know what they were doing and lost my invoice. i had to remind them i hadn't gotten paid before they finally got off their fat asses.

why they had to go through payroll and not just pay me as a freelancer, i have no idea.

i fucking hate ubc. seriously.

so i'm home from work after three straight and solid days of indexing that have left me exhausted and broken with a brain functioning at, oh, maybe 0.4 capacity. and i'm officially scared shitless about what i'm going to do with my life in six weeks after this buffer internship's over.

sure, i feel more prepared than ever to take on the publishing industry -- i'm armed with all sorts of obscure knowledge you could only get in a classroom and a high tolerance for tedium you could only get in an internship. unfortunately, i think that having one and a half master's degrees has pretty much done nothing but boost my standards to unattainable heights. any job description i read, i say, 'oh, i don't want to do that kind of crappy entry-level work.'

i wonder how long it will take me to bite the bullet and realize that i've still got to pay my dues in the real world before i get the cred to move up in publishing. no editing for nori just yet -- no, first she has to be an assistant to some editor, filing manuscripts and fact-checking bibliographies.

sigh.

i'm so tired. i just need a real weekend off. really off, where i could sit on my ass and not do any housework or contract work. just to make ends meet and be able to make the $2000-a-term tuition i'm paying the school to work for someone, i've been working my ass off editing or indexing. in some senses, it's something i'm essentially used to, since it's kind of like doing school work. mostly, though, it's just really really exhausting.

summer hours at d&m means that i have to be at work at 8 every morning.

it's 10:47 and almost time for bed.

i am officially old.

*sob*

they've confirmed my ibook's hard drive is fucked and needs to be replaced. it'll cost $120 for the part and at least $90 for the labour. the old data might be recoverable depending on the state of the old hard drive. data recovery will be another $90 or more.

*whimper*

my poor ibook. my poor stolen computer programs...my poor stolen fonts...all of my files...

*sob*

i just won a hundred dollars!

it was for a writing competition among my classmates. i highly suspect that i won because nobody else submitted anything.

it's still a hundred bucks. i promised myself that the next hundred dollars i earned would go to unicef. that was about six months ago, so i guess this is perfect opportunity to make good on my word.

word.

the fruitfly in my room is making me crazy.

scattered ambivalent crap:

1) critical mass friday: amazing. there were over 1100 people, and we took over the lion's gate bridge. it was a pretty impressive sight.

2) sunday: catastrophic computer failure. my beautiful ibook started making this clicking noise and stalled. my attempts to reboot led to additional clickling. it's undoubtedly a hardware problem; i just hope i can recover what's on my hard disk. they say to back it up, but i don't really know anyone who does that...

3) almost one year to the day, some pigfuckers rip off my sweetie's bike again. this time, they didn't even leave the wheels -- everything's gone; it's been stripped down to the frame. what's really retarded is that they're going to take the parts home and realize they can't do a fucking thing with them; the whole chain ring was custom machined.

4) i have to edit a 239-page book on fluid dynamics for wiley, and i'm getting paid far less than what i was paid for my book for springer.

bah!

dear lord.

so one of the things i have to do for my job is compile an author handbook – something editors can give to new authors that explains the editorial process, the formatting requirements of the manuscripts, etc. to do this, i'm essentially taking a bunch of scattered papers that are used in the firm and putting it all together into a coherent document. this is an excerpt from their disk requirements document:

"Manuscripts should be submitted on 3½” disks using recent versions of IBM-compatible WordPerfect or MS Word."

also:

"Never type the letter l (“el”) when you mean the number 1; and do not interchange zero and the capital letter O."

my first thought when i read this was "is this for real?" and after i'd ascertained that it was, my second thought was "how old is this document?" that second requirement is like a throwback to the days of typewriters before they put number keys on keyboard and people had to improvise. WTF?

i asked if CDs or e-mail attachments were acceptable. i mean, i don't even have a 3.5" floppy drive on my computer. turns out they're not a big fan of CDs, apparently.

if there was ever a testament to how technophobic the publishing industry is, this is it.

if i had an indian name, i'd be called 'sandaltan.'

babies.

seems like everyone is having them. my tech instructor at school, the publisher's assistant at greystone, a dude in my sweetie's lab, a friend of a friend i ran into on the bus...

i, on the other hand, dread the thought of having babies. i can't at all understand how anyone in our financial and career situation could even contemplate having babies. it's not that i don't like babies -- although clearly, i'm less interested in them than most people seem to be. i think what really turns me off about the concept of parenting isn't the child, but the thought of being obligated to interact with other parents. people who believe they're the only ones ever to have procreated. women who preface everything they say with "well, as a mother..."

same thing with dogs. some dog people are really cool, but in my brief trip back to alberta two weeks ago, my sweetie and i took his two family dogs out to the off-leash park. i sat back and observed as dogs sniffed each another's asses and the owners were forced to make asinine small talk, which revolved largely around breeds of dogs, dog food, dog toys...

it was torturous.