I'm a star!

Not actually. But I got accepted as a presenter at the 2nd Annual Trash Talkin' Pop Culture Conference at the University of Regina. I can't say I've been to more than 2 conferences in my life and now I'm presenting at one! In my mind's eye, the place will be filled with genius literati and people with really good publishing connections who will be absolutely dazzled by my 'presentation': a 20-minute story about a girl who thinks the creature in her wall is trying to kill her. I will actually talk to these people (instead of sitting and staring at my program, which is my preferred public places strategy). We will all go out to that one bar I went to with Serena and drink martinis the colour of the Carribean Sea. Then we will be fast friends, and will all become literary legends together. In this dream, I also have a very keen fashion sense and lots of high-heeled shoes, though. In reality...well I have no idea what the conference will be like. I have a feeling there will be lasagna.

The Sickness Roll-Over Minutes Plan

Sometimes I wish I could just have all my colds in one year and get it over with. Think of it. I could just set aside a year, quit my job, quit university, and barricade myself in my bedroom, buying Halls Candies off the internet in bulk. None of this silly "let's schedule you to be sick over each and every school holiday you get" business. While I can appreciate my body's decision to save my sick-hours for when I have some time on my hands...well, I have time on my hands! This cold is getting in the way of an entire week of productivity.

Think of Christmas Break. I had allowed myself a week of worry-free festivities and was just settling down to several days of school reading and project preparations when BAM my head filled up with yellow mucus and I found myself unable to understand concepts as simple as Jason Statham action films (the premise of each is: he is British. he is bald. he has a gun. he used to be a Levi's jeans model. also, someone wants to kill him.)

Think of Reading Week. I had 156 hours of projects, adventures, and food I was going to fit into those 120 hours of break. Now what will I be doing? I will be sleeping. And trying to write about Gertrude Stein while swimming in my own lung fluid.

Well, this time I absolutely refuse. I finished my last class this afternoon and now it is vacation and I know exactly what I'm going on vacation from: this damned flu. And so, as my triple action Halls candy wrapper says, "keep your chin up...let's hear your battle cry". Whatever that means.


...whew. Well, writing all that really wore me out. Back to bed it is.

Valentine's Day Oreo Chicken

This Valentine's, I was fortunate to experience a number of exciting new things, such as drinking a stranger's home-made red wine out of an old whiskey bottle, forcing several men to listen to an in-depth discussion of menstruation, and making Baked Oreo Chicken. Of these things, the chicken is the only one I can really share, and so I will.

Inspired by SMBC:

Valentine's Day Chicken.

Ingredients:
12 oreo cookies
1-2 eggs
5 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
a dash of milk
oil
margarine

First, break in to your date's brother's house, only to discover that his brother's wife is still at home knitting on the sofa. Discuss British Real-Estate shows together over several glasses of wine and eat appropriately miss-themed V-Day Easter Egg Chocolates until your significant other arrives.
Next, stand in the kitchen looking dubiously at the momentous task awaiting you. Point out that there are only 2 other people on the internet who have attempted Oreo-Coated Chicken before.

Finally, place your Oreos in a blender and crush until reduced to a fine powder. Pour Oreo crumbs in shallow dish. Heat oil in frying pan. Meanwhile, mix milk and eggs together. Dip chicken breasts in egg and milk mixture, then roll in cookie crumbs.

Brown chicken in frying pan, turning as little as possible to avoid losing the 'breading'.

Place chicken in baking dish, top with an unspecified amount of margarine. Cover and bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes. When chicken is cooked through, serve on a bed of minute rice with red wine of a questionable origin. Enjoy.

But how was it?
Before going 'vegetarian', I spent about a decade of my life having a love-affair with chicken. So maybe it was just my joy at once again consuming the steroid-enhanced chest of a dead bird carcass (cooked to perfection), or the fact that I had enjoyed at least one glass of wine of questionable origin before hand, but I must say, the chicken was fabulous.

What is it with Wednesdays?

I don't know what it is about Wednesdays, but they never seem to proceed in a normal fashion. Half of the time I can't remember the Wednesday of the week at all (this in itself is oddly worrying), and then Wednesday is often the day that your dog dies and you set off the church burglar alarm twice, or the day your girlfriend breaks up with you at the airport on her way to Paris and leaves you her cellphone to remember her by*. This Wednesday wasn't as bad as all that--in fact, I managed to suffer a lot of accidents without experiencing many of the repercussions for them. But still. Wednesdays. Watch out.

It began at 5am when I woke up with a sore throat (unfortunate but not unexpected) and then nearly killed myself going down the front walk on the way to work. This in itself isn't that strange; the February frost-and-melt-and-frost routine makes this a daily occurrence. It wasn't until 9am, after managing to cause the bakery about $100 in mistakes and losses, that I realized that this wasn't mere mishap; this was Wednesday at work. Although the order sheet was stated clearly that it was 170 cupcakes iced in red icing with white sprinkles, for some inexplicable reason I made 200 cupcakes (misfortune 1). Then, realizing that the order was only for 170, I managed to readjust other baking plans to accommodate 30 extra cupcakes. I proceeded to ice the remaining 170 cupcakes in white icing, and decorated them with pink sprinkles (misfortune 2). This mistake went unnoticed until the delivery man, already running 10 minutes late due to traffic (Wednesday Traffic), arrived to take them to their intended destination. And I don't feel it is my place to tell the rest of that story, but I can assure you it was bad (misfortune 3), and I was not the one who had to experience the customer's...disappointment (injustice! misfortune 4).

My boss forgave me for it, though, since I have a fairly consistent track record of success at being able to read simple instructions. I reacted to this by gratefully braking a 600-dollar piece of baking equipment** (misfortune 5). I snapped it cleanly in half, and I'm not entirely certain how (it all happened so fast!), though I do believe it had something to do with sheer surfaces and gravity. Meanwhile, my boss was having several complicated discussions on the phone (apparently his Wednesday wasn't faring much better). I waited until he was done to reveal the latest mishap, and offered to return my most recent paycheque to him by way of apology (potential misfortune 6). He went into his office to fully digest this new information. Oddly enough, he broke the Wednesday creed of misfortune to come out and tell me that I wouldn't be held responsible for any of the damages I had caused thus far that day.

Relieved, I slipped, tripped, and smashed through the rest of my work day***. I showed up at my Gertrude Stein course covered in the icing I had forgotten to wash off of my elbows, and for a while I thought the rest of the day was going to proceed normally (if one can ever consider the Stein class normal), but then I found myself wearing a beautiful straw hat that had apparently been worn by Katherine Hepburn when she did her gardening, and I just knew something very awful was going to happen.

I wish I could say I was right because that would have been quite interesting but, although I almost did sit on it twice, and at one point found myself trying to have a serious discussion about Asberger's Syndrome while dressed as Katherine Hepburn on her days off, nothing really bad happened to that hat. I did manage to trip over one of my own boots though.

I made a quick stop at the grocery store on the way home from work, to get some nice soup to counteract the effects of my ever-worsening cold. I picked out a container of minestrone****, shoved it into my full-to-overflowing backpack, and went home, where, lumbering up the stairs to my room, I tripped and smashed my backpack on several stairs. It was about 10 minutes later that I remembered what had been in the bag when I smashed it, and I ran back to my room to discover my books, papers, and a change of clothes awash in beans and tomato broth (misfortune...8?).

This was when I decided to stay home from my church membership meeting. The thought of all the misfortunes that might befall me in transit to and from church made me shudder. Instead, I went with the much better idea of taking out a bunch of knives, turning on the stove full blast, and trying to make my own soup (and for some inexplicable reason I decided to peel the potatoes with a butcher knife. Was this misfortune or just plain idiocy? I cannot say). While waiting for the soup to boil, I decided to pass the time by writing this post. 40 minutes later***** I suddenly realized I had a full pot of soup on the stove, set to well-above simmering. Rushing down the stairs to check on it, I managed to knock two paintings off of the wall (misfortune 9).

Then Ben arrived from the computer doctor and there was a lot of business about our family computer being wiped clean of all viruses and any files of great interest or importance, and everyone having backed up all their own files except for me, and this gives me a great opportunity to sulk and add to the list of grave misfortunes but I must admit I can't actually remember what I lost (or IF I lost anything) and anyway it was my own fault for not saving things on something other than a CD disc 4 years ago or the USB stick I lost in Halifax so I can only call this Misfortune 9 and a half. But then...Ben had been so helpful in actually getting the computer fixed that I couldn't even bring myself to sulk about it, and you know how I love a good sulk. So let's just round that up to Misfortune 10.

Now I should go to bed before I accidentally amass a great quantity of famous paintings in my bedroom and proceed to set the house on fire.

*and no that is not my story. though it's so interesting I sort of wish it was. Better to have loved and lost, so one can describe it in an entertaining manner, than to never have loved and therefore have no stories at all.

**I won't bore you with the details of what it was, since most kitchens--and even commercial bakeries--don't have it. Just imagine something beautiful and incredibly useful to the point of indispensability, like a unicorn that can produce perfectly baked cupcakes with a wave of its horn.

***There is a fun off-shoot to this story about the difficulty I had in actually disposing of the ruined baking equipment, but I'm not interested in technical writing today and I feel that you've all suffered enough already.

****My vegetarian creed managed to win out over my need for chicken broth. For some reason, I feel like when I start turning to dead animals to make me well, that's going to be the end of my 'vegetarianism'. Paradoxically, I have no problems with turning to animal carcasses for romantic entertainment value, as you will see in my recipe for Valentine's Day Oreo Chicken (coming soon).

*****Yes, it does actually take upwards of an hour to complete a post. Sad but true.

Valentine's Day: The Perfect Holiday for the Anti-Social

V-Day is a whole week away, but after unpacking a mixture of 20 dozen heart- and lingerie-shaped sugar cookies, I can't get the holiday off my brain.

The thing is, Valentine's Day is pretty unpopular with most people I know, and I can't quite figure out why. I mean, look at the alternatives:

Christmas: a holiday where everyone is expected to be cheerful and spend lots of money. If you aren't in the red and beaming joyfully on Christmas day, with a turkey drumstick in one hand and a mincemeat pie in the other, people think there's something wrong with you. If you get too into the Santa-side of things, your religious friends come over to douse holy water on your celebratory flames by reminding you that 'Jesus is the reason for the season'*. If you grumpily refuse to have anything to do with a supposedly religious holiday that goes against every religious teaching you believe in, people treat you like a social pariah. Either way, your loved ones force you into celebrating the event in a way you'd prefer not to. More importantly, you are forced to see your loved ones, whether you like them or not. There is very little room in this holiday for the anti-religious, the ultra-religious, the anti-consumers, the diabetics, and the vegetarians. Christmas: everyone loses.

Thanksgiving: Once again, a holiday where you are forced to get together with your family and eat copious amounts of meat. Mercifully, there is no meaningful present-exchange. However, no matter what measures you take to avoid it, there will be a part in the evening where you must stand up and tell everyone around you what you are thankful for. The dangers here are numerous: you must think of a worthy thing to be thankful for, so as to not appear ungrateful or too consumer-minded (or pig-headed). For example, being thankful you found a mini skirt you look good in, or being thankful that your colleague's handwriting is neat enough that you can cheat off her during every test, or just being thankful that the waitress's skirt is tucked into her underwear and she hasn't noticed yet, are all inappropriate things to be thankful for.
On top of this, there's always the difficulty of the racism associated with Thanksgiving. Although many people argue that it's our neighbours to the south who bring a touch of racism to a day set aside to celebrate that special time when aboriginal peoples helped the new colonial immigrants survive the winter so that the colonists could come back and kill them all with smallpox later, I'd say that Canadians are so influenced by American culture that Thanksgiving is instilled with a bit of controversial flavour here as well.

Easter: The juxtaposition of chocolate egg-laying bunny mutants with the Christian resurrection story makes this holiday as uncomfortable as most. Should we spend the holiday on our knees praying or looking under the furniture for pastel-coloured smarties? Well at least there's chocolate.

St. Patrick's Day: If your vision of The Perfect Day does not involve you puking up green beer at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, then what's the point of this one?

And so we come to Valentine's Day: A day where you can do whatever the hell you want. If you celebrate it, you're not alone. If you don't celebrate it, you have an equally large support group. You can celebrate this holiday by:
Eating chocolate until you burst,
Rolling your eyes and scoffing at anyone who asks you how you're celebrating February 14th,
Wearing a lacy red negligee and lazing around on a bed of roses (regardless of whether or not you have someone to watch you do it),
Dressing all in black, lining your eyes in an inch of black eyeliner, and growling at anyone who looks cheerful,
Drinking wine with your significant other,
Staying as far away from your significant other as possible soas not to give people the impression that you actually celebrate this ludicrously cliched holiday,
Getting together with your friends to watch An Affair to Remember and have a good cry,
Getting together with your friends for a zombie movie marathon,
Sitting at home doing nothing at all...
the list goes on and on. Valentine's day is one of those holidays where really anything is acceptable. In fact, even the most brutally sullen of people can celebrate V-Day; who doesn't love an excuse to be miserable? People might actually let it slide on the Day that All Single People Are Supposed to Hate. Why not go with the flow and be as petty as possible? In fact, this being the first year where I will not be single on Valentine's Day, I don't really know what to do with myself. What will I complain about now?

This is why, in a contest between a variety of awkward semi-religious holidays with too much food or drinking, the day where you can be a bitch and eat copious amounts of chocolate will always win.

Talk About the Weather

When the most exciting thing happening to me is the weather and homework assignments*, I usually don't bother putting it on the internet. Who wants to read 2 weeks of posts in the vein of "oh God it's cold it's... cold it's cold... oh it's not too bad today...Wow it is GORGEOUS out today...no, now it's cold. Now it's FREEZING. Oh, my poor wind-burned skin. Here, I'll show you pictures"?

But anyways. On to the weather. Wow it is GORGEOUS out today. Or at least it was, at 8 o'clock this morning, when I was meandering home from the gym, carefully picking my way through icy puddles and treacherous ice islands. As I was making a particularly extravagant leap across several puddles, my strong footing gave way and I found myself doing the notably ungraceful splits right in the middle of a mixture of sand, car oil, and icewater run-off, in the middle of Sargeant Ave. I picked myself up off the street, boots and jacket-sleeves filling with water, and looked around for the lucky bystanders, sure that my misfortune had been someone else joy, expecting some applause or at least a smirk of acknowledgement from a considerably dryer passer-by. However, the other pedestrians continued on their way as though nothing at all had happened. What is the world coming to?


*I'm not being sarcastic here. You should hear about my Gertrude Stein end-of-term project. If I actually manage to figure out how to make a book squirt water (and/or ink, if I'm feeling sadistic) at unsuspecting readers, you'll be treated to several posts entirely about homework, I'm sure.