Because I had no internet with me in Quebec, I had time to finish three
books:

1. Brick Lane by Monica Ali: a rich, brilliant, detailed story of a
Bangladesh woman in an arranged marriage sent to live in England, and the
resulting culture clash. The author is incredibly observant, giving us a
setting so thick with detail that we can practically smell it! The plot and
characterization are realistic, the ending is satisfying, and I felt myself
still caring about the characters after the book ended, and wondering what
happens to them next. (Aside: I wonder if authors know what happens to
their characters after books end?)

2. Cosmopolis by Don Delillo: a witty satire/allegory of the dot com boom
and bust. All the action takes place during one drive across New York City,
all the characters are insane, and the whole thing feels unintentionally
hilarious, as though the author thinks he's serious. Very quick and easy to
read.

3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon:
brilliant, definitely lives up to the hype. Portrays Asperger's quite
realistically for an author who claims to have done no research. The plot
is compelling, the point of view is enlightening, the characters are all
realistic, and it is often sweet and often hilarious. The only problem is
that the jacket flap blurb gives away a key clue to solving the mystery, and
it would be much more interesting to read the book without that piece of
information and see how quickly you can solve it. Read this book if you
haven't already, but don't read the jacket flap. I just have one question:
how did he know to pick that particular right-angle triangle?

My U of T student number starts with 99. Is that because I finished high
school in 99, or does it mean something else, or is it just a coincidence?
I'm asking because I find it very odd that they'd number me as though I
started at U of T out of high school.

On VIA 1, (which, by the way, is god), there are attendants at the entrance
to each train car to help you lug your baggage up the stairs onto the train.
Generally these attendants are men in suits, but on my train ride home the
attendant at the entrance of my car was a woman wearing a skirt and heels.

I am quite capable of lugging my own suitcase, but generally I let the
attendant do the tricky part of getting it up the stairs because that's what
they're there for and I'm lazy. However, since this attendant was wearing a
skirt and I was wearing pants, I told her I didn't need help. This is just
the way I do things - I relieve other people of heavy lifting and other
awkward physical labour if they are wearing a skirt or other cumbersome
clothing in the hopes that this karma will come back to me when I'm in a
skirt and heels.

So after I've dealt with my suitcase and settled into my seat, this
attendant comes up to me and asks me to follow her to the front of the car
so she can show me how to work the emergency exits. It turns out that on
trains there needs to be a passenger who knows how to open each emergency
door, just like on airplanes the passengers next to the doors need to know
how to open them. So I go along and learn how to open the door. However, I
found it odd that she had asked me. With my high-maintenance appearance,
scrawny little arms and dumpy middle, I hardly come across as the type you'd
want to go charging to the rescue in an emergency situation. "Well," she
explained, "As you see, it takes some physical strength to open this door
manually, and you're the only passenger on the train right now who is able
to carry their own suitcase."

Moral of the story: pretend to be weak and helpless on VIA rail.

I am back, I do have stories, I'm just too lazy to type them all out now.

I'm just posting to let anyone looking for work know that there's employment to be had with Elections Canada.

There's a school of thought that if there is a crisis, and there is nothing
you can do personally to help with the crisis, your course of action should
be to redouble your efforts to do whatever it is you normally do to
contribute to society, with the idea being that at least that one aspect of
the universe will run smoothly.

I think my digestive system subscribes to this policy. It can sense that
I'm nervous, it can't do anything about it, so it responds by increasing
productivity. Unfortunately, that is not helpful at all.

On that note, I'm off. Wish me luck!

I'm not doing so well. I'm nervous because I'm leaving tomorrow. I hate
travelling. I'll be fine once I'm on the train. Then I'll either be fine
or nervous once I'm in the hotel. Then I'll be nervous as hell all the next
morning until I've met my contact person (whose name they haven't yet
deigned to tell me!). Then I'll be fine. Then I'll be briefly nervous until
I make my train home. Then I'll be content. Malheureusement, despite my
awareness of the process, I can't turn it off. Mergle. I should go to bed.

"And I nodded because that didn't count as being a detective" - the curious
incident of the dog in the night-time

I love this book!

I have 2 Gmail invitations. Here's a list of goods and services I'd consider
trading them for. (These aren't based on the value of the Gmail
invitations, but rather on the goods and services I need):

1. A Fido-capable cellphone, in good working order, under a year old.
Basically I want to be able to stick my smartcard in and it works, plug and
play.
2. A new computer to my specifications. (not that I expect anyone to buy a
computer in exchange for a gmail account, but you never know)
3. Use of your full-time student status for my Globe and Mail subscription.
This would mean that you tell me your name, student number, and year of
graduation, and I receive my Globe and Mail in your name. If they ask,
you're my and mi cielito's roommate (because I currently receive it in his
name, but he's just graduated). This would also mean that you can't get a
student discount should you choose to subscribe to the Globe and Mail.
Problem is that my subscription doesn't expire until July.
4. A spider-proofed screening of ROTK. This would involve going through
the DVD that has just been released, and the extended edition when it comes
out, noting the chapter numbers that contain spider scenes, and noting at
what point the viewer should press the "skip chapter" button to avoid seeing
any spiders. You would also have to preview the DVD features and
documentaries, note if any of them contain spider images, and note at what
point to press "skip chapter". After you screen, you would present me with
written (or emailed) instructions on how to avoid every spider image on that
DVD. Problem is that I'd need both the current edition (so I can see the
movie - I haven't seen it yet) and the extended edition (which I intend to
buy) screened, and the extended edition doesn't come out for several months.

I might consider trading for these things, depending on who is willing to
trade with me. I might also ebay the invitations. I might also give them
away to people I love. I haven't decided yet.

I finished two books recently:

1. Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard. I hated, loathed and detested every
minute of this book. I only finished it because I make a point of finishing
every book I start. Almost every character in this book uses hateful speech
and language almost all the time, in ways that are totally unnecessary and
utterly excessive. That just ruins the book for me. Perhaps such language
could be acceptable in what is otherwise a good book, but this book is
populated with shallow, one-dimensional characters trying to convince you
they're complex, and a plot that ranges from "meh" to "I cannot see how this
is either enjoyable to read or of any literary value other than the fact of
being words printed on a page." It claims to be a mystery, but you find out
"whodunnit" early in, and the rest of the book is "So what do all these
other secondary characters have to do with it?" And to top it all off the
cover art prevents reading this book in public. As a whole, the book is
trying way too hard to be all edgy and ghetto, like a late-blooming,
pre-pubescent suburban 14-year-old trying to emulate hiphop artists to
compensate for his insecurity in his manhood. Ugh.

2. That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. This is not about plot, it's
about characters. The main character is taken firmly out of his element and
placed in the Texas Panhandle as a conceit to describe the life and times of
a town full of colourful characters, past and present. As such, the plot
sort of meanders, but by tacit agreement the plot is only there because a
novel needs a plot. It's all about the characters. I found the characters
rather unappealing so I did not enjoy the book that much, but I can fully
appreciate that Proulx accomplished what she set out to do, and did it very
well. Worth reading if you think you'd enjoy reading about colourful Texas
Panhandle characters. Contains brief, gratuitous, mildly disturbing,
slightly-but-not-too graphic spider scenes that induced cringing and loss of
appetite (they don't have anything to do with food, loss of appetite is just
one of my pre-panic symptoms), but did not cause panic.

on MASH they're playing checkers with shot glasses. Whenever you jump a
piece you get to drink the shot. That is possibly the greatest drinking
game I've ever seen!

Fw:

How to trees know to produce a ring every year? Like how do they know when
a year has passed? Is it because of winter? If so, do trees in tropical
regions have rings?

Once upon a time, our printer at work was out of order. When this happened,
someone put an "Out of Order" sign on the printer. When the printer was
repaired, the sign was removed and put on the table beside the printer,
where it sits to this day.

Next to the printer there is a pillar, whose job, I assume, is to hold up
the roof and provide general structural integrity. As I stood by the printer
today waiting for my document to print, I briefly pondered sticking the "Out
of Order" sign to the pillar - just a bit of surrealist humour. If I was
still working at my previous job I would have, but here we have procedures
for everything, and I'm sure if I moved the sign, someone would implement
the Emergency Pillar Out of Order Procedure.

According to the href=http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/fire/cadinfo/livecad.htm
target=_blank>Toronto Fire Department Active Incidents page, my building
is on fire right now.

Whatever it is, it doesn't seem too urgent. The alarm isn't going off, and
the firefighters aren't so much rushing in and out of the building as
ambling.

GIVEN that there is a doctor shortage in many areas, and
GIVEN that, for whatever reason, they are hesitant to let foreign-trained
physicians practise without further training/certification/something...

They should have a system whereby foreign-trained physicians work in
walk-in-type clinics in underserviced communities in exchange for
queue-jumping on the certification process. The public could know the
foreign-trained physicians' credentials so they could decide for themselves
whether to go to that clinic or do whatever they were doing before the
clinic arrived (waiting a long time, going to another town, whatever). I
can see why you perhaps might not want a doctor whose qualifications may not
be up to Canadian standards to, say, manage your regimen of psychiatric
medication or perform delicate surgery to repair your nervous system, but
that's no reason why they can't prescribe penicillin and give flu shots.

Today all the women in my office except for two were wearing red shirts and
black pants. Weird.

Totally Impractical April Fools Jokes:

1. Switch the directions of the subway, so southbound subways travel on
what are normally northbound tracks, and vice versa.
2. Get a Magical HTML Editing Search & Replace Bot to replace all
occurrences of "about" in Canadian websites with "aboot".
3. Everyone in the world writes their April rent cheque for one cent less
than the amount of their rent. See how that affects the economy.

You have to give John Lennon and Yoko Ono credit: a bed-in is a damn good
protest! You don't get blisters on your feet, you don't have to worry about
the weather, the police have no reason to assault you because you're just
lying there in bed, and you can catch a nap whenever you want.

Things They Should Invent: make DVD players so they can recognize a disc,
and you can program them to do certain things with certain discs. For
example, go straight to this chapter, or automatically Play All, or skip a
certain chapter. (Yes, my ulterior motive is to avoid phobia-inducing
scenes).

Or, even better, the individual chapters on the disc are rated based on the
traditional movie rating system, and are also rated for other things:
violent, sex, language, innuendo, fart jokes, boring non-funny exposition,
and all manner of phobia-inducing creatures. So then you can set your DVD
player to automatically skip all chapters that you deem unsuitable. Comes
with an access code so parents can restrict their children's viewing.

I was thinking, as I often do early mornings, about the simple pleasures of
being home sick. Being sick is not fun, of course, but there is a certain
satisfaction to lying in bed, zoning in and out of sleep, listening to the
rest of the world go to work and school, and knowing that this is the single
best thing you can be doing for yourself and for society.

It then occurred to me that being sick is also somewhat pleasant because
Maslow's hierarchy of needs kicks in, so you stop caring about anything
except the fact that you're sick. Your concerns about your purpose in the
universe and the current political situation and that project at work and
the poor quality of cable television programming and various dysfunctional
interpersonal relationships are all put on hold, and all you care about is
Getting Better. Not that I'd want to be sick all the time, but it is
somewhat refreshing not to care about anything more than staying warm,
hydrating, sleeping, and taking my medication on time.

Perhaps this is why some people use alcohol and drugs to excess, well beyond
what they can comfortably handle. While they are drunk/high, and while they
are recovering, their body is essentially sick. It has been invaded by an
uncomfortable quantity of foreign substance and now it must survive this
invasion. So for as long as the substance is affecting them, they don't
need to worry about anything else.

I wonder if there have been any scientific or academic studies about the
optimal size and composition of a sitcome ensemble cast?