Epigraph

Alright, well, this is it.

If there's one thing for which I am grateful, it is that things change. I don't know if things change on a cosmic, eternal level – if universes run in loops or existence is an endless stream of conscious and unconscious – but things change in an individual lifespan from an individual perspective, with no regard for the individual's views on the matter. This concept has a number of names, depending on how it is perceived. Sometimes it is called Hope.

The galaxies spiral away from each other and back again. Things change, more or less. And so unto eternity. But forever is pretty big, so we break off chunks of it to look at it better. These chunks have a number of names too, all of them equally valid. And sometimes they are called Stories.

The thing about a story is that it ends; in fact, the ending is the most important part. I would mention at this point something about that being the fundamental difference between eternity and bits of eternity, and thereby try to justify my lack of a fitting close for this fragmented look at high school life, but I don't think I'd even be ready to end a story just yet. (As evidenced by the fact that I never really have ended a story just yet.)

To tell the truth, I'm not convinced we've even made it to the prologue. If the grand symphony is about to begin, this blog has been about the people who come in beforehand and set up chairs, or fold programs, and the band that's warming up backstage, and the first members of the audience coming in from the snow. Because in my mind, it is very often a certain kind of grey, cold, still day that happens sometimes near the end of November, a day like a blank canvas or an empty page, vibrating with lyrical possibility.

Despite gratuitous romanticism and rambling, I don't mean for you to imagine my eyes glittering with sentimental tears as you read these lines. By now, you've probably figured out that I'm a closet optimist, but we can both pretend that we don't know anything about that, and I can keep on playing the cynic for a few more paragraphs.

I won't claim to be ecstatic about everything in my life at this point. I'm still a little bored. I'm still a little needlessly sad. I'm still all the things I have ever been, though some parts of me express themselves in different ways now, and will (I always hope) continue to shift as my world does. But the landscape of my life has developed in interesting ways since April of 2006, and I – like my old friends the trees – have been shaped by the storms I have endured, however trivial those storms have seemed.

So what now. To tell the truth, I'm not sure. I'm never sure. I'm never good at keeping my fingers silent for long, either, so perhaps I will be continuing my legacy of rambling at another address in the near future. Should that happen, I will post the link in the sidebar here, because I've chosen to keep the RFS archives open a little longer. Should that not happen, I am quite confident that other things will.

I've been writing this post for the past two hours. It isn't the twenty-sixth anymore, really, but that's a pretty good date to go out on, so it can stay. And now, my friends, I draw the curtains closed, or throw them open. In doing so, I bid farewell to a more youthful time – not to my friends from that time, but to my past self. I'll make sure to visit her now and then, but we aren't bound together anymore, and we can go our separate ways.

And first of all things, my own separate way leads me back to the concert hall, where the orchestra has begun filing in, and the percussionists are setting up, and the room falls silent as all eyes face forward. You can see it too, can't you? The rapid whispers of pages turning, finely formed fingers resting on finely carved fingerboards, dark-robed profiles illuminated from above. (Like a dream. The waves roll in and out.) In a moment the violins will begin tuning, followed by the dark melodious clarinets; the crystalline tones of the horns; the cello's sensual, melancholy voice; and the glorious bass. Then the conductor comes out, and then we play for awhile before the concert ends.

After all, the eternal music will eventually change, more or less. And no individual chunk of time lasts forever, except perhaps as part of an endless stream of conscious and unconscious, where universes, among other things, run in loops.

I feel pretty peaceful about it.

S.T. (orm)

I got so rained on today. It was unbelievable.

Looking through the archives, I am shocked to find that I have never yet elaborated on my admiration for a certain 'phonometrician' on this blog. Composer, pianist, and artist extraordinaire, he was notorious for the cryptic (yet, I assure you, absolutely logical in context of the music) comments he included on his manuscripts. There's probably a reason his name is one letter short of 'satire'. He was the Zappa of the late nineteenth century, giving his 'Pièces humoristiques' titles such as Embryons desséchés (a suite consisting of three short piano pieces, each named after a class of marine invertebrate; the third one finishes in a brilliant cadenza that you absolutely must hear sometime) and Sonatine bureaucratique (a parody of Muzio Clementi's style; as someone who was once forced to play that stupid clementi sonatina in C, I approve wholeheartedy). His character was also apparently in Moulin Rouge.

I speak, of course, of the great frenchman Erik Satie. Truly, the world lost a beautiful and original mind when he died in 1925. His Wikipedia article includes a poignant list of the items his friends found in his room after the funeral (no one except Satie himself had been inside for twenty-seven years). Excerpts are presented below.

• great number of umbrellas, some that had apparently never been used by Satie,
• a total of four pianos: two of which were back to back, two of which sat upside-down on top of the other two
• numerous unpublished compositions

These compositions included, of course, the outstanding work Vexations: a score of a single page, bearing the inscription, 'Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses'. Modern interpreters usually believe this to mean that the piece should be played 840 times in a row.

Inspirational fuel for all future college students.

Summer is over. And in honour of the end of an era...

...

SQUIDPUNK!

Oh come on. What did you expect?

If I don't think of a title soon I'm going to be very cross indeed because there is soup waiting

I was walking home from piano today. (Not the best opening sentence ever, but forgive me...I'm just warming up here.) My backpack was full of books, including the complete Mozart sonatas, and my sickly neurons beat their angry fists against the back of my skull. The sun shone like it had just been the subject of a bad review, and felt it needed to prove itself. ('I am afraid that Mr. Sol's brilliance has waned in the last several years. Perhaps we would do well to turn to fresh talents, rising stars in this universal field, who may be better equipped to light up our lives.) A little girl pushed a wheelbarrow, the sky was blue, leaves crunched under my feet....

Of course, that was the big event. It took me awhile to realize it, too, like something you'd expect from a cartoon character. Leaves crunching under my feet, in what I felt was still the middle of summer.

Part of me, unsurprisingly, was all 'oh man where did all that time go', but part of me was actually quietly pleased about the matter, because I love fall. And not just because I get to wear coats. I love fall in all incarnations, the beauty of october and the gloom of november (september is less interesting). In some ways, I like it better than winter, because after fall there's winter to look forward to. (And what do we have after winter? The gloopy, slushy ides of march. Also the rest of the month, which I'm always glad to get out of my system.)

Too tired to write any more.

Hot and a Cold

IF YOU FIND THIS MESSAGE

YOU ARE AFRIEND INDEED

AND YOUR ARE A SOVIOUR FROM

THE DEEPS,

-message in bottle found by the beachcombing crew that unearthed the objects currently residing in an enormous wooden cabinet in the Tate Britain, London

I'm sick. Being sick sucks. Not because I'm disgusting and spouting inconvenient fluids at every intersection, and not (entirely) because of the inevitable headache, but because I get to stay home in bed and not do anything for an entire day. When I'm healthy I can fill the minutes and forget about what I'm doing with my time, but now I'm doomed to melancholy contemplation in my room, and an aching back because I don't know how to sit in bed.

That's what I had to say. I'm sick but not dead, even though I've been a very bad blogger and my skull feels like it's been smashed about with bricks.

star-weaver

Summer Shower

'Why are you eating Arthi's slime?'

-Alex to Jacob

I GOT WET.

(yes beautiful. give me the flash and the crash of a storm over brightsunny any day. i will take the blue fierce light that bursts out like so many nerve endings, neurons firing frenetically, an interconnected web of celestial superhighways. give me the rivers that flow up-down rather than the lazy slithery earthly forest creeks, and i will flow upstream until i can see the stars all around me. they always say write what you know but i say: write what you dream. i dream electric.)

Potpourri

In lieu of an actual post explaining my current thoughts and the direction my blogging will take in the future, I'll just stick up some notebook excerpts so opaque even I've forgotten what some of them were about. And they're from a month ago.

Silently following the silver-blue unicorn through the forest into the clearing of light.

The trick is to string words together based on musicality and not literal significance.

Starflakes of morning light scatter over the shady river. An ondulating snake of grey shimmer wriggles out a smokestack; a ship floats in front of the house. It wears the dark habit of an elderly sister. Cracks run jagged across the ashen dawn.

It is all the newness and the dust of the day. A stick figure scrambles spiderlike on the rocks as the boat approaches the island, a soft note of welcome resounding in an all but empty world.

(I like this dream. It is a nice dream.)

She had an aromatherapy voice.

I believe in everything. I tell people it's because there's some truth in everything, which is true -- like everything else. But it runs a little deeper than that, to the point where some might find it worrisome (I don't). I really just believe in everything. It's not so much that I believe a part of everything as it is that I am willing to accept any fantastic but logical story tossed my way. ('Realistic' but illogical has less of a chance.) That is why I can't lucid dream.

But the birds are not themselves truly free. No one here is, I suppose. I would like to take my home with me, drive it or carry it on my back, and never have to concrete myself into the ground.

Castles in the sky. Doesn't it sound beautiful? Castles made of cloud and sunlight. Give me cloud castles over Earth castles any day.

Why do people feel the need to limit themselves to a single reality? (Calvin & Hobbes, etc.)

A piano tuner that can only work when drunk, because the vibrations seem magnified and clear to him.

I've somewhat changed my philosophies since these scribbles (jeez, why would I use so many words to say something so simple?), so it's interesting for me to look through them now. Maybe less so for you, but it's exam time, and you might find this better than doodles or suchlike.

Anyway.

Piano exam over!

And here's to you....

This goes out to everyone else who never found Garfield funny.

Guys, I'm killing myself laughing.

http://garfieldlostintranslation.blogspot.com/

All Things Become Clear.

I love my teacher's new piano. It's a stunning golden-brown Steinway Model A with crystalline tonality and incredibly sensitive reaction. Playing on that instrument, a musician can lay bare the foundations of a work, and build the colour up from the core of the sound. The hammers on the strings ring out bell-like, pellucid; there are no layers of sonic varnish to distort the pristine notes. It's his third piano since I started there in the ninth grade, and even though the first one may technically have been the highest-quality specimen, my heart belongs completely to this new companion.

My teacher has been warming to it too. Tonight at my playthrough (audience of three, Jenna included), he pointed out the characteristics I have mentioned. His friend, probably a musician himself, agreed.

"It's a beautiful piano. And you -- (looks at me) -- belong there."

Gyahhh.

Does he know -- he can't know -- how long it's been since I felt sure of that? Does he sense, perhaps, how uncertain I've become of my place lately? Witness this speedwritten notebook excerpt, from just three days ago:

it sits
before me a great landscape of sound
silver beams of light drawn into eternity
and I watch the clatter of the
mountains rising, falling back,
white waves in the great black ocean.
An arm reaches toward the ceiling;
my hands are timid, uncertain.

I am not yet ready
to fly atop this darkling spirit.
I trip and stumble through the paces
up and down the monochrome path;
the notes false, still,
after so much bloodshed.

Now, though, I can regain lost confidence. And I can devote myself to being whatever I am...not for any practical purpose, but only out of love -- pure and unadulterated as the sound of the piano itself -- for the beauty at the heart of all things. That is where I belong.

but there will come a day
when together I and the beast
spread wings, lift,
and teach ourselves to trace
glorious radiant patterns through the stars.
On that day and after,
the universe belongs not to us,
but to those who look and dream
and listen.

There will be more and more for all of us.

Reminiscence and Expectation

Q. Why is Wistful like an octopus?
A. Both express frustration with ink.

It might be a little more appropriate if I was in the habit, lately, of expressing much of anything. Nevertheless, I wanted to slip that joke into a post at some point, and time is sort of running out for RFS and me.

I did think I'd hit 400 posts by the end of high school, and then could close down with pomp and fireworks. I haven't, and I'm still not sure about when or if I'm going to finish. And what exactly should finishing entail -- the end of new posts, or the complete disappearance of WistfulSparrow?

It makes sense to stop by the end of the summer. After all, it's clearly a high school blog I've been writing here. Alongside the occasional humourous anecdote and interesting piece of information, a casual search would reveal much unwanted baggage from the earlier years -- archives of trivialities from the eighth grade. I know, because I've been through everything recently, backing up important parts to prepare for any eventualities. Furthermore, I question whether Blogspot is any longer an appropriate outlet for me, as my presence on the internet is more subtle than it was three years ago, and will hopefully continue to evolve in the future.

I don't know where I'll be in a year. Maybe still exactly here in this room. Maybe halfway across the globe. Whatever the circumstances, I'm sure you anticipated the probability that I will not want to be tied to an older incarnation of my being. That said, I'm not sure I'll erase the archives immediately. They will likely hang around on the web for a few months before I unpublish them all. I may also keep the domain name, as a memento, or to prevent anyone else from adopting the name I once made my own.

There will be more about these decisions later. For now, maybe I should be honest about some things.

I don't constantly talk about this, so it may surprise some (though probably not any of my beloved readers) that I've decided to study music in university. I haven't decided to only study music in university; that is, knowing my tendencies, I may attempt to further my education in multiple fields. I'm not so sure about english literature because I don't find I enjoy or benefit from academic analysis: poetry is about what you feel it and not what this word and this word put together means in some dictionary. Perhaps this will change in the next two years.

But so much for school. I honestly don't know if I'll even last through CEGEP (where I will not be studying music) without taking off someplace, so this is a little...vaguely outlined. Higher education is somewhat less affordable outside of the province, which could be a problem (very unlikely to win scholarships in music). Obviously, I'm not implying that I absolutely need to leave Quebec, what with McGill and all; I'm just suggesting that it might possibly have a small chance of working out that way, given the particularities of my character.

It doesn't really matter though, in the end. I like to learn things, but from a practical/financial point of view, I don't think the number of years I spend in school will have much of a correlation with my eventual earnings.

Certainly, these are the naive perceptions of a pampered seventeen-year-old, but I'll never know the world until I see it. Certainly, the idea that I might not spend much time in university might surprise many of my teachers, but I wouldn't underestimate my own ability to make stupid decisions in the space of an instant.

We'll all see where the wind takes us.

There is nothing else to say.

I have some stories, and some of them might even be good. I don't know. I can't talk or blog at all these days, and maybe until the end of the school year. I haven't felt so damn constrained since elementary school, and I very much need to get out of this beautiful, colourful metropolis so I can see what colour the sky is on the other side of the walls. This is my last battle with tedium for awhile, at least, and I must not surrender to the mundane.

I know, I know. This lunacy isn't really something I can call on anyone to share. The melodrama is my own peculiarity, and my episodes of delirium are the sole true indication that my brain may not be wired quite the same as everyone else's. So until school is out, and until the world shifts a little, I'll crawl inside my shell of self-absorption and sing myself to sleep with ballads of the fantastic, with requiems for unborn worlds.

By now you are probably well past sick of hearing about my itchy, itchy feet. But when a person is made to swallow their words and repress their impulses all their life, the eventual explosion usually transforms that person into a caricature of their reveries. This is a familiar plot device: never permitted sweets, he opens a candy shop; abused as a child, she becomes an assassin. The fifties became the sixties.

My impulse has a name: wanderlust. It is a very simple one to repress. After a mere decade and a half spent in one place, it has become an all-consuming obsession; every moment is spent contemplating a driving ambition to leave the city I love. And -- here's the other half -- I don't want to live here again, afterward, when all is done. Because in my childish vision there is no 'done', and life will continue to evolve forever if I wish it.

If I think about it, I know in my heart that one adventure would never have been enough. I still want those bloody spaceships, of course. I still want to be able to fly away from everything. And if someday I do, well...don't hold it against me forever.

I can't wait to be old and wise. Then I'll know how stupid I was for thinking so.

'No one's ever smart enough than me. '

-Jacob

A small update, to make it clear that I'm not dead, and perhaps (dare I dream?) to spur my fellow blogsters on in a difficult time of year.

First, I've been continuing in much the same way as ever: staying up too late for no reason, complaining about the optimism of crocuses, dreaming of spaceships and, occasionally, playing some music.

I finished my public speaking some time ago. Originally, I was going to lift Jacob's original idea, and write it on death. I did throw together the first little bit:

I want to die. Not right now, but eventually. I want to know what it's like.
It's not that crazy, is it? I mean, adventure, the unknown, the 'final frontier'. If I can't go into space, I can at least go into death.

EDIT: Apparently, I had thought of this before.

Then, as you probably perceive, I got a little sidetracked, and wound up writing my speech on our prejudice toward extraterrestrials and other species (akin to the racism of previous centuries). It was the nerdiest, craziest speech of my life, midnight ramblings to inebriated friends excluded. Having slept particularly little the night before, the performance was appropriately terrible: I spoke far too quickly, my dark-ringed eyes bulging in their sockets, my hair reaching out in all directions like the arms of an octopus on amphetamines.

By the by, did you know that no octopus has tentacles? If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, you can click one of the links to Wikipedia below. A warning, however: the sentence extracted from the online encyclopedia, and preserved in this post, is possibly the single most frightening thing I have ever read. (With the exception of this article.)

Unlike the giant squid, whose arm and tentacles only have suckers lined with small teeth, the Colossal Squid's arms and tentacles are also equipped with sharp hooks: some swiveling, others three-pointed.

Now that I've destroyed any possibility of either of us sleeping tonight, allow me to amuse you with the ending of my speech. Hey, it's tradition. I must apologize in any case, as I am afraid the conclusion lacks the punch of other examples. The first time in my life I either open or close with a quote, and I go for Calvin and Hobbes.

(You know, sometimes I do manage to convince people that I'm perfectly sane. I'm not sure how either.)

Should we someday come across extraterrestrial life at an earlier stage of development than our own species, it is almost certain that we will eventually exploit it in some capacity. If, by contrast, our world should be discovered by another civilization – and perhaps it already has been – we must hope that the aliens are more compassionate than we would be, and indeed than we have been historically. For now, I turn once again to Calvin for elucidation regarding humanity; he sits on the red soil of Mars, arms folded.

'Why should the Martian be afraid of us?’ he asks, crossly. ‘We’re just ordinary Earthlings, not weirdos from another planet like he is.’

It isn't exactly my favourite piece ever, but there is a part of that conclusion that absolutely thrills me. Without a doubt, I am more proud of that single phrase than all the other phrases in the speech combined.

And perhaps it already has been.

To tell you the truth, the reason I wrote the speech was probably, at a subliminal level, just so I could say that. If so -- what? Are we being left alone (too uncivilized, barbaric)? Maneuvered by unseen hands? Or infiltrated, steadily and secretly? Personally, I believe it is most likely ignorance and hubris to imagine that we might be of any interest to extraterrestrial intelligence, just as it is so to imagine that we might be the pinnacle of evolution in the cosmos.

But maybe, hopefully, we can find out for sure someday. It's the twenty-first century, and I demand spaceships. Then I'll discover the key to time travel, and everything will be perfect.

Oh, and yes, I am now officially certified to drive straight, whatever the reality. This means future posts to be written about my escapades with my father's car (standard). My current crowning achievement: starting the vehicle, driving around in a circle, switching from first to second, and stopping. This also means I am technically capable of rescuing friends in the dead of night, although it becomes a mite trickier from a practical viewpoint (Toyota Sienna).

Heh, 'small update'.

I dreamt of dolphins, and a whale.

Aliens etc.

'Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot of a fully charged icing anointment utensil, he poots forths a quarter-ounce green rosette near the summit of a dense but radiant muffin of his own design.'

-'Muffin Man', Frank Zappa

My computer has had a stroke and lost all her memories, but she is recovering with the loving support of family and friend (me). In case you were losing sleep over it.

In lieu of a real post (because it is March), I'm just going to put up some more doodles. Personally, I love this stuff; the things other people imagine can be very surprising, particularly with people who don't draw much otherwise. Only a couple today, until I scan some more.

I don't plan ahead, so most of the time the figures end up sprawled across physics problems. Normally, I would take the numbers out of the scanned images, but because my (mediocre) photo editing software disappeared with much of the rest of my computer, I've had to resort to airbrushing in Paint in order to make the numbers under the actual drawing less visible.

Egyptian style is cool, or I can't draw feet. Also some ill-defined referencing of REM lyrics.

I must be the most impatient person in the world.

I had pie for breakfast

on pi day, hooray.

Powerful, Beyond Words

Some of you may remember the Scholastic store in New York, where I read part of a story and we looked at the harry potter merchandise. (That trip was way too satisfying to my not-very-inner child.) Some of you may also remember leaving the store, only to find out that I was actually quietly busy at the cash.

'It's for my mother,' I insisted. 'Her birthday is coming up.'

('So...you bought her a picture book?'
'It's a graphic novel.')

I finally read (read? looked at pictures, really. but looked intensely) it on Friday, and I was really quite stunned by its beauty.

As always, clicking will tell you more. It's really quite breathtaking, as a story and as artwork. Of course, it's also set in a strange and wonderful world, with strange and wonderful plants and animals and architecture and technology...the sort of things I love best.

If I Didn't Know Better, I'd Think this Post Was About Computers

'...What's the difference between Protestants and Christians?'

-sebastian

Everything is breaking all the time.

My winter coat's zipper is completely jammed, so I've had to improvise every morning for two weeks. My clarinet has a bad cold, possibly pneumonia, and barely wheezes through the clarion register. My guitar -- my beautiful Ambrosine -- is in the hospital being repaired. And, of course, my own mental health is at stake, for my computer has taken ill as well.

Worms. Nasty ones, too; desert makers forty feet long. When I first noticed something was going wrong, it was just a matter of sluggishness, pop-ups, no pictures loading in explorer, and impromptu shutdowns. Also, none of my antivirus software worked, and system restore was blocked. Unsurprisingly. Later on, it was more a question of the cpu slowing to a complete halt as soon as the desktop loaded. I must have restarted fifty times in the last three days.

Our techie friend is out of town, and I know very little about anything computer-related, but I've been doing my best to get everything back in shape. Sort of. The fact that I am typing this on my own computer is a testimony to my many hours of lost sleep. The fact that I am typing this in Chrome is a testimony to the fact that the worm is smarter than I am.

In the process of the fighting of the good fight against computer viruses, I backed up all my files and some of my music, erased all the minor programs I could think of, and combed the internet hunting for new bug-killing freeware. Thanks to above techie friend, I was able to find a trial version of Kaspersky, a Russian scanner. It saved my worthless ass, but it's hard to take its language seriously:

Most antivirus programs: usually do stuff to viruses like 'quarantine', 'clear', 'delete'
Kaspersky: NEUTRALIZE.

I suppose it's a genius. It restarts the computer so it can eliminate viruses before they kick in. Still, the war has not yet been won. It could be awhile longer before I'm back with a real post, although I may have something small up here soon.

Lucky for you I don't act on all my impulses.

Grade Trip, 2009

Farewell, my friends. February and March are useless for blogging. I have six tests next week and a ridiculous science project to attempt, so it will be awhile before I am back with anything of substance. I close for now with a busride excerpt.

...

Every morning was colder than any other. Every day in the city began in a cacophonic explosion of sunlight, grit, breakfast cereal. The needle on the record player looked the grooves on the disc over, felt them, stuck. The roads carved left-right-left in brisk lines between the buildings that were little by little pushing the sky away. All was white-and-grey, brown, water dripping off air conditioners, and rickety iron fire escapes snaking down from towers where the paint peeled. The cars would not stop when told to.

The dragon slept in the basement, its fiery snuffles floating up from the skylights of its apartment. It slept but watched, eyes throughout the grid of the streets and pavement, and also in a children’s store with foxes and baby elephants. Now and then its tail would swish.

Where we stayed there was a park where pigeons (black, white, black-white, speckled brown) bobbed along and sat together atop the street-lights. The buildings were very tall and would not fit inside a camera. One became small looking at them.

There were men and women walking dogs, but no strays, no cats in the great downtown. There was a time for cheesecake, and too many cups of coffee. There was also a time for waiting in the underground, and running through turnstiles, and (most of all) for poetry. In poetry we find life and the reason for sticking
to it.

Find myself a city to live in.

Cat Books

There must be a reason why you never hear stories about dogs. Boots aside, the feline is wildly popular in literary circles, at home with a variety of casts and settings. To name a few, the cat has been in books with

-fairies (spelling may vary):

-rainbow chariots:

-hotels:

Clicking will tell you more, but if you find any of these anywhere anytime, I strongly recommend the read.

The rest is silence.

'Because you know what? If that insulted you, it obviously...did.

...Uh, think about that.'

-Mistah Z

In case you haven't noticed, I am rapidly losing patience with high school. Last time I posted here, it was to complain about my fellow students, but my fellow students are frankly the least of my concerns. I won't go into details about my run-ins with certain teachers and certain members of the administration, because I sincerely doubt you're looking forward to hearing about my stupid authority issues; after all, I'm hardly the only one who would appreciate being treated like a sentient being every now and then (though I probably have the worst temper of anyone I know, outside the family, and thus am probably the most bothered by it). Not that I have anything against non-sentient beings, of course. They're probably the wisest of us all.

That said, I could have spent today skiing.

I bought some frozen yogourt from the patisserie this afternoon. I chose vanilla because the apricot containers were all broken, and, well -- white seemed like a good choice today. A little boring perhaps, but then how many people were eating ice cream outside today? And, well, it was really good. It's 3.00ish for a smallish container, but the taste and texture are quite superior. Given that the containers are clear plastic, the dessert is also less likely to have a TCBY-esque hole in the middle. And you can recycle them.

Unfortunately, dear friends, I fear I've led you on a little. I wrote this post with a single purpose in mind; the rest is filler. I want to ask a favour, that perhaps none of you will ever need to grant.

Although the obscure phobias are far more interesting, the fear I am about to reveal is a far more common one. Mortality doesn't bother me; dying is something I'd like to try sometime, when I've had enough of the other stuff. Being buried alive does bother me. Taphophobia is far less rational now than it used to be, what with 'the advent of modern medicine' and all, but I imagine it would be at least as uncomfortable now as ever to wake up underneath six feet of ground and a big rock.

So, cut me open first, or burn me. I don't really care, so long as you make sure I'm dead.

And on that cheery note, we end the post....

Sometimes I think I'm only happy when I have a keyboard beneath my fingers.

Eight, Eleven, Seventeen

'Mom? Is the biggest number in the world an odd number, or an even number?'

-sister, whose birthday is on saturday

My brother and sister have said some pretty adorable things over the years. (I am told that I have as well, but that is for another post.) A quick glance through the archives should reveal as much, but most of the magic has not yet been shared. For instance, when my brother was small, my parents were wont (as indeed they have been with all of us) to debate trivial matters with him with all the solemnity of preachers or judges.

It was decided one evening that my brother should take a bath.

Mom: 'I know you don't want to take a bath, but if you have to, I'm sure you will take one with dignity.'

Kid: 'Who's Dignity?'

However, it is the mispronounciations and the spoonerisms that have always been among my favourites. My brother is surely the king of these ('Blah-blahs' for 'Loblaws'), but my sister has been known to make a few interesting adjustments to the language herself.

Of these, my absolute favourite is her rendering of 'specific'. She pronounces it 'pesific'. It's really only missing a letter, but it's amazing when it comes up in a sentence more than once. From 'pesific', of course, we derive 'pesifically' and 'pesification' (although never, interestingly, 'pesify'), words that I'm considering sending to Oxford University for inclusion in their next edition of our English-language Bible.

And now: a note to certain members of my math class, à la Sophia and Alicia.

First of all, let me make it clear that I believe you are very good people, and if I knew you better I am sure I would love you dearly. If you were actually going to read this, I would advise you not to take personal offense at my anger, and instead work on the constructive advice I have so subtly provided.

That said, it isn't as if you had no idea this year was coming. You have all finished high school math, and you know well the inflexibility of our administration regarding schedules; what else did you anticipate the eleventh grade might hold in store? No, you were forewarned, yet you persist in annoying our (frankly) already touchy educator (and no, I won't elaborate on the rumours) and being generally irritating to the other students. And by 'other students', I of course mean me.

The course is called 'Pre-calculus.' This would imply that its objective is to prepare us for further studies in the field. There is some purpose to our learning, some reason for us to take math this year, and while I agree that it may be less important than some classes, your constant nitpicking and complaining is absolutely insufferable. How dare you berate our teacher for outlining concepts that you personally feel have no practical use 'in real life'? (As if 'real life' for any of us could take place outside an academic or intellectual setting.) How dare you, as athletes and musicians, deny the value of uselessness, and the beauty of impracticalities?

If poets you are not, at least permit our instructor to do her job, and be appreciative of the fact that she -- unlike some -- is actually motivated to teach. Judge the worth of the course in private, after you have graduated, after you have gone on to more advanced material, after you understand a little more about the world and have thrown off this pathetic adolescent arrogance.

My word for 'egg cosy' was definitely my crowning achievement.

Chromosome Issues

'Who cares about money?! This is ART, you blockhead! This is great music I'm playing, and playing great music is an art! Do you hear me? An art!' (pounds on piano) 'Art! Art! Art! Art! Art!'

-Schroeder

I saw the most beautiful human being on Saturday. The instant during which our paths crossed was insufficient for me to determine this person's gender, not that it matters in the slightest. He or she was of average size, with angular features and short, dark blue hair.

Dammit, I wish English would take a cue from Turkish and use a non-gender-specific third-person subject pronoun. The Turkish word is perfect: a single letter, an expression of eternity and of nothingness -- 'o'.

je = ben
tu = sen
il/elle/on = o
nous = biz
vous = siz
ils/elles = onlar

I have no use for gender roles either, but arguing against stereotypes is counter-productive. By acknowledging a divide between the sexes, we only reinforce this divide.

No more feminism, no more 'sensitive guys' (good will hunting etc, please shut up), no more math class segregation. No more anything about what I shouldn't be wearing or saying or doing, please. It's not about rebelling against conventions, so much as ignoring conventions I find meaningless. (Just wait till my marriage rant.)

It's been said before, and now I never need to say it again. Saying it defeats the purpose.

I know you will all forgive my exhaustion-fueled choler. Oh, and I've added a link again. As nerdy as ever, I assure you.

I wear whatever shoes I like now.

The Back of the Bookstore

It's been a good month for books. Aside from the six books I received for my birthday, the five that came out of christmas, the two I pilfered from my father's shelves, and the few remaining novels from a long-ago excursion with Senor Peonie, I was fortunate enough to stumble across a secondhand store while in BC, where I lost no time in picking up cheap, tattered scifi paperbacks. One of them I present to you now.

Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed is a staple of science fiction literature (oxymoron? you decide), but up until now I never realized it was also a well-written novel. The two distinctions are not exactly noted for frequent convergence, so it was a refreshing surprise to find a book that combined worthy ideas with pretty words. It was Max's suggestion that I read it, and it was fortune that led me to discover it at the White Rock secondhand bookstore, but I first heard about it from this list that I would suggest you check out, but would by no means compel you to do so.

Now maybe I can wean myself back off webcomics for awhile.

East it is.