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.