Oh look, my cousin is ruining my life again

Today I discovered the Other Amy (my arch nemesis) used to operate under the email address I am using now. I've started getting emails from people asking how it is in Toronto and trying to track down old friends from the days when she was young and less capable of muscling me out of everything that is mine by right (example: a gym membership with the correct birth date and an ID photo that actually has my face in it, and a Google search that doesn't result in photos of a thong-clad stripper cuddling up to a one-eyed gunslinger. I liked her better as a red-head anyway). Just when I thought we'd put an end to this game. I should just give up and start impersonating her. We both seem to have a knack for attracting zombies, after all, so I'm already half way there.

Meanwhile, in the less glamorous life of the Antihero Amy...

The perks of living alone: another lazy lazy list

The perks of living alone:

-There is no such thing as an inappropriate time to take your clothes off.
-Anything in the apartment can be a dirty laundry hamper. Here is my rocking chair hamper, my patio table hamper, my 4 chairs from the biology department hampers, and my floor hamper
-Any hour is Guilty Pleasure Pop Music Being Played Embarrassingly Loud hour.
-I can use the same knife for the jam and the cream cheese without having to feel bad about leaving crumbs in either of them and making the rest of my housemates wonder what foreign objects are now floating around in their food.

The drawbacks of living alone:

When people come over the only things I have to offer them are chairs covered in dirty laundry to sit in, embarrasingly loud pop music to listen to, and cream cheese full of crumbs.

Things I have learned this month

No cause for ceremony or explanation there. Things I have learned this month:

1) Don't blog about the hilarious time you met a drunken stranger dressed up as a zombie stripper, if you later realize you want to be friends with said drunk zombie stripper and then have to pretend she wasn't the main focus of your blog this month.

I'm not Undead yet, either! (More on that to follow)

I was walking back to the Village from a church celebration on a Saturday night during the zombie apocalypse, wondering how far the undead minions had spread from their original nest on Osborne, when I suddenly ran into one. It was a darkened street corner just before River intersects with More of River to become a 5-lane death street, and there was a six-foot-tall creature of the undead who may have been a schoolgirl or a stripper or a schoolgirl stripper in a past life, calmly wandering across River in her stiletto boots, waving down cars.

She was playing the part of a zombie (unfocused eyes, inability to stand straight, walk straight, or speak straight) so well that I was at first a bit afraid of her, and elected to remain on the other side of the street, but soon she was lurching towards me, until we were both on the corner of the 5-lane death street, and I was cowering against a lamp post and asking her to please not eat my brain.

I'm not dead yet! (more on that to follow)

It stands to reason that as soon as I commit to blogging on a weekly basis I'll disappear from the blogosphere for 2 1/2 months with no explanation or hint as to when I will return.

Where have I been, you ask? Having a grand adventure, you hope? But of course! The grand adventure began when I suddenly found myself in possession of a lease on an apartment, right after committing myself to being a deadbeat basement-dweller in my parents' house indefinitely. Oh, life.

Tip: Don't Ever Do This

This post was going to be a public service announcement about a common (I thought) danger one encounters in the cake-decorating industry. But then I ransacked Google to find a photo of said danger to go with the post, and realized that, judging from the lack of pictures, I am the only one that this happens to. I've managed to do it several times now, though, so I'll just tell you about the most hilarious incident and remind you to Please Don't Ever Do This:

The day my breakfast nearly destroyed the world

I have this ambition that some day soon I will move out of my rent-free bedroom in my parents' house and suddenly 90% of my income will be devoted to rent, groceries, student loans, and the essentials to make me feel better about the fact that I'm broke all the time (such as brightly coloured hair dye). And maybe I'll put the last 10% into a savings account, if I'm smart. In order to prepare for this moment, I've been trying to train myself to be broke all the time already, by giving 90% of my income to my student loans officers and clinging to the rest like my life depends on it*.

This Weekend I Will be Girl Who Didn't Think That Decision Through Fully

I ended up at the all-famous Folk Fest for about 12 hours this weekend. I hadn't been to Folk Fest in eight years, as summer is a time when I am constantly broke anyway and if I'm spending money on anything (other than booze) it's the Fringe Fest, not the Folk one. But I have a friend who has this bewildering talent for winning to tickets for things, and I am all for the cheap and the free, which is how I ended up barefoot in a park wearing a dress made out of scarves at 10am on a Sunday morning.

Birthday State of Mind

Wow I'm really terrible at updating this thing. But that's alright, because, as I have made clear from my last better-late-than-never post, June is essentially a series of parties interrupted periodically by work. And what sort of party involves a cake turntable, martini shaker, fancy necklace, ball-peen hammer and eleven-pound anvil? The best kind of party (that would be mine).

In my household, we try to make birthday gifts useful and personalized. The cake turntable says "I see you've been trapped in the bakery business for so long you have developed Stockholm Syndrome and want nothing more than to decorate cake in your spare time as well" (true fact. I requested this item specifically, so if anyone wants a cake with a really smooth finish you know who to call). The fancy necklace says "I see you are a classy lady". The cocktail shaker says "I see you are a classy lady who knows what vermouth is", and the anvil says "I see you are a classy lady who needs to smash things".

And it's only Tuesday. Just wait and see what it will be like by Saturday, when I have actually unwrapped and used all these gifts. Okay, so I might be sitting here draped in necklaces with a martini glass in each hand, deciding whether to spin or smash the rest of my birthday cake. But again, it's only Tuesday.

Happy birthday to me!

Graduation Celebration!

Traditionally, during the first half of ever year, I have an excuse every month to not blog regularly. For January, I am re-entering the school year and there's really nothing to blog about except the weather, for February, I'm trapped under such a frigid blanket of cold even blogging about the weather seems ridiculous, by March I'm preparing for the-end-of-term rush, April I'm having the end-of-term rush, May I'm recovering from April, and June I'm recovering from the shame of having not accomplished in May everything I swore I would do after year-end in the middle of January. And also there are birthdays.

However, June is particularly bad this year because I've actually finished my degree (officially), and there have been such a dizzying onslaught of parties in my honour that I've managed to convince myself my life will soon resemble the opening scenes of the Great Gatsby trailer I've developed an unhealthy obsession with*.

Bad Luck and Boarder Crossing

The laws of irony state that if, in the morning, after several increasingly frustrating discussions with a number of idiotic people, you announce that you may be the only smart person left in the world, then that very same evening, you will find yourself stranded at the Canada/US border with no money, a faulty cell phone, a purse full of tap water, and a damp passport that expired two years ago, wondering how to ensure none of your associates never hear about your own little bout of stupidity*.

The best part of all this is that there was absolutely no reason for me to actually be in the States, anyway.

Health, Wellness, and the Cool Hair Club

Have you ever thought about how impractical it would be to wear a bike helmet while sporting a 6-inch mohawk? I didn't until the other day in the Village, when I saw a guy with said hairstyle riding his bike and I thought, "he might just be the only guy in the city who has a valid excuse for not wearing a bike helmet". Then I wondered whether that is a valid excuse for not wearing a helmet. And I decided it was, which says a lot about where my priorities on safety lie.

To be fair, I had just dyed my hair purple, which meant he and I were in the special Cool Hair club together, and he acknowledged this fact by making a strange roaring sound in my direction and waving (really!), and I'm pretty sure having cool hair protects you from bodily harm anyway.

Walking that thing line between eccentricity and normalcy

If you haven't noticed, I do my best to advertise my strangeness to the outside world. I'm not sure why I started doing this. I may have been under the impression I would some day live off the fruits of my strangeness, like maybe people would pay to have their photo taken with me in my Cookie Cat outfit, or would buy t-shirts with the Snake Foot on them, or actually pay to hear the story of the time I got into a flame war with Virgin Mobile. 

I could at least be famous for my eccentric qualities, like Salvador Dali or Gertrude Stein*. But I haven't yet figured out how to grow a luxurious mustache and I am not in a long-term relationship with the inventor of pot brownies, so I'm not sure if the road of eccentricity is really open to me yet.

I feel like a lot of people have no choice but to make a living off of appearing to be normal. This seems exhausting, but I figure some day, one of those people will be me. I've been left under the impression that most employers out there require a certain amount of normalcy from their employees (which is why many of the most interesting people are unemployed). Like you have to wear a suit to work, or not come to work with purple hair and cupcakes on your fingernails**, and you definitely shouldn't have a blog filled with letters addressed to your house-cat, no matter how well-received those letters were.

Generally, meeting these sorts of standards takes an extensive amount of effort. But every once in a while, I accidentally do something too normal to put on the blog, like buying clothing from big box stores, or sleeping past 8 a.m., or reading Eat, Pray, Love. So then I've got to wonder, if you can be normal by accident, am I slowly becoming increasingly more and more normal over time? Is there a median of (outward) normalcy we all generally gravitate towards? And how will I know when I've reached it?



*I know I know, they were also famous for their artistic abilities, not just their mustaches and romances.

**This is why it's best to pick a job where the majority of customers walk through the door hoping to find a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the other side.

The glamorous life of the unemployed

When I was younger, I worried a lot about choosing the right job. It would have to be one I enjoyed but also one that made me enough money to survive live off of comfortably*. The money part was pretty easy to figure out, but how on earth was I supposed to predict what sort of job I would actually enjoy?

The Triumph of Cyborg Amy

Ever have one of those days where you wake up and discover the gym you've been going to on a weekly basis for the past 3 years has replaced your ID photo with a picture of your second cousin? Really? Maybe we can form a support group of some sort.

I'm Back!

I’m back! Finally. In the weeks I’ve been gone (from this blog, not from life in general), I’ve learned some important things about my character. For instance, the side-effects of being done school include an aversion to cell phones and a sudden determination to run a marathon but also eat cake every day.

Things I actually DID learn in elementary school

I tend to be a bit hard on my childhood education, based on the few elementary school lessons where I was told men have less ribs than women because that's how God created Eve, or that time I realized my 5th grade teacher was illiterate. However, my school did teach me several valuable lessons.

For instance, when I was in 4th grade, one day, we all came to school and our classroom had been transformed into a room on the Titanic. By that I mean there were portholes and a flotation device with HMS Titanic on it, not, you know, that the room had hit an iceberg and was filling with water (though I'm pretty sure we pretended it had at one point). We spent the next few weeks learning about that ill-fated ship--we learned morse code*, the names and intimate details of several of the passengers on board**. But there was one fact I learned that I really took for granted, and that was this: the Titanic was an actual ship. Apparently that is not common knowledge:***

Then there was the day, also in 4th grade (it was a good year), when we came in and the room was all covered in police tape and there was a chalk outline on the floor, and our teacher read us the report of the early-morning crime, which involved someone being assaulted with a spoon (they lived. The chalk outline was a bit misleading). From this I learned about police reports, and how to draw a really nice mugshot, which I'm sure will serve me well in the future.

4th grade was also the year I learned what ramparts are, what a gauntlet is, how to make stained glass cookies, and that not everyone would respect my aversion to gutting pumpkins. 4th grade is NOT the year I got over my aversion to gutting pumpkins, but I did learn to be on guard at all times, in case someone (such as my teacher) would force me to come in contact with raw pumpkin guts during a pumpkin carving contest or any other time when pumpkins are around.

*which I promptly forgot
**Like Molly Brown, whom everyone remembers, and that guy who wouldn't pull his wife back onto the lifeboat, whom everyone has forgotten.
***Alright alright, I'm sure some of them are trolling.

Random Wednesdays...

I've been having kind of a strange week and it appears I'm not the only one. For instance, this afternoon I observed the awkward end of what I can imagine was supposed to be a romantic gesture, when a young woman, who was being chauffeured down the sidewalk perched on the handlebars of her date's bike, suddenly discovered that one of the handle breaks had torn through the seat of her sweats and lodged itself in a tangle of torn cotton-spandex threads. It took them forever to find a way of getting her untangled without them both falling over. I walked very slowly so as to see her triumphant escape. Luckily, she handled it pretty graciously.

My Life has Reached its Pinnacle

You know you're a pop culture nerd when your greatest achievement* of the year is figuring out how to incorporate Texts from Last Night into a critical theory paper. And then you expect other people to be as excited about it as you are, instead of giving you that look that says, "Ah, yes, so you've discovered a way to write a paper entirely comprised of BS. Well done."

On the contrary, I take my work very seriously. But who wouldn't get excited when you switch from quoting Lacan and Derrida to putting things like this in your research essay:

“Bob the builder, bob the uilder bob the builder bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbjbbbbbiotch!pp!!!! (sic)”


No seriously, it's a study of the fragmented nature of the postmodern lifestyle as exemplified through the user-generated content of North American 20-somethings.

Butanyway, that's why I haven't been following regular blogging schedules. Only 2 classes left in my undergrad degree. Whew.


*Aside from speaking at a Pop Culture Conference...and being a presenter at a lunch time speaker series on Comic Books, I mean.

And then My Cousin became a Knife-Weilding Gangster

It would appear my Updated Every Tuesday and Thursday mandate has become a Secretly Only Update On Wednesdays sneak attack. Hey, regular programming lasted for what, three weeks? I call that a win.
 
For my latest run-in with my other self, someone accused me of being a marking assistant at a school in another city and tried to enlist my help to create The Student Assistant Crime-Fighting Heroes Guild or something like that, and it took me several days and some rather convoluted conversations to piece this all together and once again point them in the direction of the Other Me.

Ugly Cat goes to a better place

One of the more popular blog posts I've written was about Capu, the ugly, snotty, half-bald, flea-ridden, wheezing, sneezing, skin-flake-coated 12-year-old cat who spends most of his time rubbing his nose against the furniture and bare legs of anyone who happens to be in the house. In the past year or so, I've mentioned this cat more than my boyfriend (as evidenced here, here and here), mostly because my boyfriend is less likely to wipe his nose on the back of my hand (a character trait that I really appreciate, but which isn't all that blogworthy...I think...).

However, for all that I complain about Capu a lot and insult him on a daily basis, it is with great sadness that I must announce he passed away this weekend.

The Constant Disappointments of Bus Culture

You know those hilarious short stories, creative non-fiction, and stand-up comedy routines that all centre around the bizarre assortment of people who ride the bus?* There are two types of hilarious bus stories: there's the kind that actually involve bizarre situations (the "...and then this crack addict dressed as a dinosaur climbed on the bus and started handing out pretzels to everyone who would sing the star spangled banner with him"), and the kind that were written by people who clearly haven't spent enough time interacting with the world around them and think having sit next to a stranger is An Event (you know, "oh man the bus was so crazy today! this guy sat down next to me and he was just so...fat...and then, he like, tried to talk to me. it was so weird, he asked me for the time. and stuff. what the hell?").

Just so's we're clear, I'm talking about the first type of story. I'm not really interested in the "I don't know what real people are like and was never informed that I would actually have to interact with one of them" type. I thought I should clarify, since I'm about to start complaining in earnest.

I'm your biggest fan...

For most of my life, I've had difficulty understanding the thought process behind being a fan of someone. To be fair, for most of my life I've also lived in a box with very little exposure to the outside world. But why be interested in the day-to-day goings on of certain people? Why does Selena Gomez keep ending up in the Top 10 news stories of the Free Press? Why do we watch lengthy videos of Justin Bieber doing his hair?

Then I realized that I'm not actually above fandom. I just have very weird tastes in..."celebrities".

Is that my voice? Is that MY voice?

Over the years, I've often ridiculed people for mistaking me for, in no particular order:

--a raucous partygirl
(most notably by one of the regular customers who always came into a bakery I used to work at; this stemmed from the time he asked me how my weekend was and I told him I couldn't remember; for some reason this made him assume I had spent the weekend in a drug and alcohol-fueled stupor instead of lazing around reading books, which is probably what I actually did).

Regina won't know what hit it...

I have once again been accepted into the Trash Talkin' Pop Culture Conference at the U of R. The fact that they had record numbers of submissions this year and I still managed to get in makes me feel like I should make some self-deprecating joke about not trusting the judgement of the organizers, but let's face it, undervaluing onesself is so passé and I'm too awesome for that anyway.

How I Learned to End A Story with a Minimal Amount of Bloodshed

When I was young, I had a constant struggle with story endings. My issues led me to create the following ill-advised rules:

1)    The story is not over until every character in it is dead.

2)    No one is allowed to read my story until it is absolutely finished.

I clung so stubbornly to my two Rules that if anyone managed to catch a quick glimpse of my current prose piece whilst any of the characters in it were still alive, I would consider the piece to be ruined. Devastated, I would take the pages of the now-defiled story to my room and tear it to bits.

Now, years later, I still cringe as I pass an unfinished story across the table for a colleague of mine to read, but I force myself to do it anyway. After all, I have learned to side with my characters. A reader’s opinion can save one of my ill-fated heroines from an untimely death when I’ve given up on other ending options.

Creative Ways to Avoid Hating Yourself

We've all been there. One minute, you're skipping merrily along the street on a sunshiny day thinking about what a beautiful, creative, fascinating, charming, open, and downright amazing person you are, when suddenly, for no inexplicable reason, BAM! it hits you--you realize that you're actually a self-centred, horrifically spoiled, idiotic, sniveling brat*.

Who knows what triggered it: maybe someone traps you in an argument that proves you're not as smart as you think you are, maybe you missed out on your daily dose of caffeine and every ounce of joy it embodies for you, maybe there was a pileup of the Self-Loathing chemical** in your brain, and you haven't managed to work through it all yet.

Hilarious Shenanigans to Avoid Doing (especially if you're drunk)

So, you're hanging out with your best buddies, possibly imbibing some of those bad-judgement-call-inducing beverages we've all heard tales about, and after a few you realize that you want to do something wild and crazy--something hilarious, something where you can all look back on your lives and say "hey, remember that time we did that wild crazy thing? was that not hilarious? we were so very cool back then."

But, as has already been pointed out, depending on what you've been consuming, your ability to make rational decisions may not be the best. Now everyone who has been in this type of situation should have some sort of fail safe rule-of-thumb to ensure that they don't get carried away in their shenanigans. Some possible rules I've heard of are: Will I be too embarrassed to show my face at work tomorrow if I do this (if so, do not proceed)? Will there be photos of this that I will be embarrassed for my grandmother to see and since we are Facebook friends, she most definitely will (if so, do not proceed)? Will I go to jail (if so, do not proceed)?

Watch those renovations or your house will become the latest cat gym

Years ago, I found out that it is possible our house started out as a small shack just the size of our kitchen. The rumour started based on the fact that the kitchen is made of a different set of materials than the rest of the house and if you move the fridge you can see the seam where the kitchen and the rest of the house are joined. You can also see the crack in the middle of the kitchen wall where part of the place is clearly sinking into its own foundations, and I often envision the house cracking in two and going under, much like the titanic. But that's another post for another time.

Jane Austen's Guide to Marrying a Millionaire: 18th Century Values for a 21st Century World

After a short conversation with a friend of mine where we exchanged a combo of Pride and Prejudice quotes and dating advice, I realized that a Jane Austen dating guide post was long overdue*. I am sure those of you who did not grow up on the BBC's P&P mini-series and who do NOT collapse in a fit of giggles if someone says 'All the Officers!' will find this guide especially helpful, because I can only assume you will take it even more seriously. And so, without further ado, I bring you

I'm alive, but my cellphone doesn't work...so is it a good day or not?

When I'm feeling negative, I like to set up a list of pros and cons of the week to help me realize that my life probably isn't so bad. Actually, this is a lie. I don't do pro-and-con lists unless I'm strapped for things to blog about, so this list is for all you lovely viewers. Hope it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

day whitaout pen

No, the title of this post is not proof that I am a) drunk, b) finally taking a stand against the proof-reading police or c) giving up on the English language entirely. Apparently, "day whitaout pen" is one of the key searchterms people use to find my blog (and thanks to this post, the next time you're doing a google search for a day whitaout pen, my blog is twice as likely to pop up. You're welcome.).

I hadn't checked up on my blogging stats in a while, and I was delighted to find that my top search keywords now include:

-cat is hacking and breathe smells like fish
-is moral bankruptcy something you need to file for
-crumb genitalia
and, most importantly,
-natalie pollock's boobs.

"disturbing post" was also in there, but that's to be expected.

Spinsterhood: the nature vs nurture debate

I think my brother moved out on Friday. One can never be sure of these things; he could just be on an extended sleepover/roadtrip/crime spree with his friends. He didn't exactly say goodbye to me; the only indication that he had possibly moved out was a facebook status update detailing the list of items he was packing (throwing knives, bowie knives, halbards, machetes, video games, no clothes).

Then his tricorner hat mysteriously disappeared from its place on the hallway nule post, which is always a good indication that he's vacated the premises, at least temporarily.

My Neighbourhood Drug War and the danger of West End streets

A little bit ago, one of the more notorious houses on my street had a bit of a drive-by shooting. Just a bit of one, mind you; no one died, and my motto has always been "I'm not worried unless death is involved," so when a news crew showed up on my doorstep and wanted to talk to me about violence in the West End I responded with nonchalance bordering on naivety.

I maintained that I had lived in the area for about 18 years and I had never feared for my safety, went on a monologue about how nice it is to live here, and encouraged viewers to come on down and tour the neighbourhood.