the past six days have been a blended series of contracts and papers and jobs eating up my time (*). I've been stuck in a serious rut of "get up in the morning, do one thing for one pay, then do another for another pay, oh my god its 8pm!" routine. the money's okay, for a student. the money would be great, if it were 1995. but i'm willing to make due for now. i think i'll actually carry on with some of these contracts so long as they're offered to me (the big daddy seems to be long-term, so long as the american economy holds out) in order to keep a sock-drawer full of cash on the go, and also to pay down some of the student debt. yay student debt.
i booted up an old laptop today. I hadn't turned it on since at least 2005, but it may have been since at least 2003. It's a little difficult to be precise on this date. Most of its files are from a pre-wedding time period, but every now and again I encountered something from 2005, post-wedding, when looking over its contents. the neatest things discovered are the cultural and personal relics from a past time, though. the desktop is plastered with a photo of El Cohen, which The Pineapples noted was once a livejournal icon I used. The "My Computer" icon is renamed Zinedine Zidane, likely in honour of Zizou's antics at Euro 2004, while the hard drive is titled "Sweet Homewrecker", in honour of Joel Plaskett. I'm not big on Plaskett, but I do like his album titles.
It looks like the machine was set up to be a simple MS Word and LJ-ifying beast. I had reformatted the hard drive - this much I can remember - but most of the documents sitting on it now are old Word and Access documents, and various temporary files used by Semagic, the offline LJ-writer. For a moment there I nearly logged in just to say "Hello world out there." Oh live journal, how did we ever come together, only to stray so far apart? Excuse me for one more precious moment as I head off to write a wondrous ode to your cyber-social-constructive ways.
(* - It's funny that I talk, that we all talk about how our work eats up our time. Our work is our time. It is part of our lives. That shouldn't be ignored. It shouldn't be dwelled upon, either. But it shouldn't be ignored.)
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
33. Caffeinated Hazy Mornings
[this post is a straight-up copy from my other blog, oregano. i'm toying with the idea of shifting to blogspot, for a number of conflicted reasons. there's no need to read both blogs, as they are one and the same (at least until further notice).]
le sigh. here's a list of stuff to consider.
1. i've had five nightmares in the past six nights. this is rather odd, since i hardly remember my dreams, let alone wake up from them. Several have involved zombies at war with other zombies, fighting for the soul (and brains) of mankind.
2. there is a mess of TaxMan paperwork still sitting on my desk. Revenue Canada won't go away. I've been asked for the third year in a row to send in all of my paperwork because I've been selected for a "periodic review". I'm suspicious. If Revenue Canada wants to audit me full-on, they should just do it already because i'm rather tired of these shenanigans. Go big or go home. As your boss says, RevCan, Fish or Cut Bait.
3. due in part (but still completely my fault) to the large mess of TaxMan paperwork sitting on my desk, i completely forgot to correspond with the Uni regarding my funding for September. According to their timeline, my funding is now in jeopardy, so I'll have to go to the bursar on Monday and beg for a reprieve. It'll all be good in the end, which is just as well, because I don't want to explain how it is that I lost their letter in the pile of Revenue Canada correspondence, who has now sent me so many letters in the past two months that the pile is over three inches high.
4. i don't think i'll have time to read the Mobe and Glail today. Sadness.
5. wouldn't it be nice to produce real thought-provoking work on a daily basis? oh, to be a snooty french philosopher. i'd love to wake up in the morning, eat some toast and jam, and mumble some words that the world finds profound but in all likelihood borders closer to nonsense.
5a. in all seriousness, if i ever became independently wealthy, i'd go find a nice comfy chair and just start thinking and writing. and i wouldn't stop until death becomes me.
6.Profound. What a neat-sounding word. Total non-sequitur: I need to go find and read Wilde's de profundis again. Perhaps after the 20th.
7. i love how wilde, for all his decadence (which we revere him for), was a closet catholic. so many victorians were.
8. to turn a phrase akin to marshall mathers III: "i guess there's a little catholic in all of us." har har.
9. j'aime du café.
le sigh. here's a list of stuff to consider.
1. i've had five nightmares in the past six nights. this is rather odd, since i hardly remember my dreams, let alone wake up from them. Several have involved zombies at war with other zombies, fighting for the soul (and brains) of mankind.
2. there is a mess of TaxMan paperwork still sitting on my desk. Revenue Canada won't go away. I've been asked for the third year in a row to send in all of my paperwork because I've been selected for a "periodic review". I'm suspicious. If Revenue Canada wants to audit me full-on, they should just do it already because i'm rather tired of these shenanigans. Go big or go home. As your boss says, RevCan, Fish or Cut Bait.
3. due in part (but still completely my fault) to the large mess of TaxMan paperwork sitting on my desk, i completely forgot to correspond with the Uni regarding my funding for September. According to their timeline, my funding is now in jeopardy, so I'll have to go to the bursar on Monday and beg for a reprieve. It'll all be good in the end, which is just as well, because I don't want to explain how it is that I lost their letter in the pile of Revenue Canada correspondence, who has now sent me so many letters in the past two months that the pile is over three inches high.
4. i don't think i'll have time to read the Mobe and Glail today. Sadness.
5. wouldn't it be nice to produce real thought-provoking work on a daily basis? oh, to be a snooty french philosopher. i'd love to wake up in the morning, eat some toast and jam, and mumble some words that the world finds profound but in all likelihood borders closer to nonsense.
5a. in all seriousness, if i ever became independently wealthy, i'd go find a nice comfy chair and just start thinking and writing. and i wouldn't stop until death becomes me.
6.Profound. What a neat-sounding word. Total non-sequitur: I need to go find and read Wilde's de profundis again. Perhaps after the 20th.
7. i love how wilde, for all his decadence (which we revere him for), was a closet catholic. so many victorians were.
8. to turn a phrase akin to marshall mathers III: "i guess there's a little catholic in all of us." har har.
9. j'aime du café.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
shredded
another day, and another two pages. rock the solids. i don't know what rock the solids mean, but the torontoist would suggest it's something scatological. i'll let the web-wide-world decide that one, i guess.
i spent the last two days shredding extraneous matter. that's a lie. no extraneous matter was shredded. i simply wanted to say "extraneous." i'm not even sure how "extraneous matter" fits within a shredding metaphor. "extraneous" is one of those words that sounds like it should really be two. Like some wordsmith developed a linguistical-nuclear-fission between "extra" and "simultaneous" or "spontaneous", with the lost letters served up as a lexical fallout upon the pages. wondrous.
anyway, i spend the last two days shredding extraneous matter. it consisted mostly of three-plus years of bills that the pineapples' grandmom ought to have destroyed long ago but instead retained because they are in her son's name. it became my duty to erase from the world, like an Enron accountant, any trace of my in-laws' financial existence since 2005. i began with some gusto, making cute little origami ducks and airplanes before sending the leafs of paper to certain doom. but within the space of an hour i grew annoyed with the entire process and had to move toward an efficient separation and organization of matter to be shredded and matter to be simply disposed of. i was both god and monster to the paper, all made with at least 30% post-consumer fibre. not one piece was spared from the malice of my will, my deeds, and the machine that facilitates the doom. there are now two LARGE bluebags full of minced paper in the recycling bin awaiting to find bliss, or at least a subtle peace, after My destruction of their race.
i spent the last two days shredding extraneous matter. that's a lie. no extraneous matter was shredded. i simply wanted to say "extraneous." i'm not even sure how "extraneous matter" fits within a shredding metaphor. "extraneous" is one of those words that sounds like it should really be two. Like some wordsmith developed a linguistical-nuclear-fission between "extra" and "simultaneous" or "spontaneous", with the lost letters served up as a lexical fallout upon the pages. wondrous.
anyway, i spend the last two days shredding extraneous matter. it consisted mostly of three-plus years of bills that the pineapples' grandmom ought to have destroyed long ago but instead retained because they are in her son's name. it became my duty to erase from the world, like an Enron accountant, any trace of my in-laws' financial existence since 2005. i began with some gusto, making cute little origami ducks and airplanes before sending the leafs of paper to certain doom. but within the space of an hour i grew annoyed with the entire process and had to move toward an efficient separation and organization of matter to be shredded and matter to be simply disposed of. i was both god and monster to the paper, all made with at least 30% post-consumer fibre. not one piece was spared from the malice of my will, my deeds, and the machine that facilitates the doom. there are now two LARGE bluebags full of minced paper in the recycling bin awaiting to find bliss, or at least a subtle peace, after My destruction of their race.
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