4 AM: Protagitron SMASH

Okay, so it's 4 in the morning, and I'm not asleep. Thank you, Douchebag Debaters Society, for choosing 1:30 in the morning to convene outside of my window in the alley. Oh, I shouldn't be too hard on you. One of you made me laugh with "Don't be walking like that! This ain't LAVAL!" And you did break up the meeting, like, two hours ago. I have only myself to blame at this point for my insomnia. I'm just feeling obscurely unhappy with myself right now, and instead of exploring the issue, I'm just bouncing ideas for genre fiction around in my head.
I've always wanted to be behind a series of books. Not, like, Harry Potter levels of success, but the kind of middling series that spits out a new volume every six months or so, for small but consistent profits.

The Butch Strongdyck Adventures:
I really hate the name Dirk Pitt, but Clive Cussler must be doing something right looking at his print runs. Apparently many, many people want to read about a terribly-named man doing ridiculously manly things in the most ludicrous fashion possible. It's never enough for Dirk just to punch someone, he has to punch some one while driving a jeep on a treacherous mountain passage, and instead of punching that person with a fist he's punching them with a cobra. Wait, no, that's something I want to use in the first Butch Strongdyck adventure, "Nile Dragon."Butch also wants you to know that his relationship with Dill McKidd, his wisecracking right-hand man, is only one of deep friendship, and not homoerotic in the least. No matter what Dill says about Bangkok after his fourth sloe gin. Butch Strongdyck is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.

The Two Hearts Agency Mysteries
People, look at the Women's Network, 'cause clearly the desires of an entire gender can be expressed by a network. The ladies, they dig the weddings. And ladies dig mysteries. They'll have to dig something that awkwardly combines the two with a dollop of product placement. Best friends and business partners Kate and Alice run Two Hearts Wedding Planners, and solve more than the case of the poorly altered Jessica McClintock gown. Whether a guest has received a Lalique champagne flute through the throat or choked on a Tiffany Novo engagement ring, Kate and Alice, like the bride, get their man. Also, every title will be a pun, each more horrifying than the last. The first in the series? For Groom the Bell Tolls.
It tolls for HEEEEEE.

By the way, trust me on the time. It's 4:36 am now, but the Blogger time stamp is being all screwy. Oh, I only wish it was still 11:55 pm on the 22.

Chasing the Applications Dragon No More

I'm trying to wean myself off of the Facebook teat for a bit. So, the account has been deactivated. The last time I tried this I barely made a week. This time I'm going for a month.
Pray for Protagitron.
I've already got the shakes.
In other Internet news... you get out of one fandom, and things suddenly get interesting. I went through a few years of being a minor X-Men fangirl, and have the shirt to prove it. Unfortunately, the virus-like spread of X-Books, and the unfortunate Ratner movie stilled my beating mutie heart. But now Deadpool and Gambit are going to be in the Wolverine spin-off movie, which means my butt is pretty much in a seat.
Yep, Gambit was my first fictional character crush. And he's played by Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights. My fandoms are colliding.

Mythbuster

I just demagnetized my monthly metro pass for the second time this month. This is why I went one and a half years without buying another monthly pass, because I would screw it up at least once a month, and have to waste minutes standing behind confused tourists waiting to flash the troll in the booth my card. This time, my pass wasn't kept by my magnetized name tag, or next to my cellphone, or anywhere near the North Pole. It was just in my back pocket.
Cogito Ergo Sum*: MY ASS HAS ITS OWN MAGNETIC FIELD.

Those yo momma jokes are true! IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

*Yes, I know this is not how it should be used.

It's Cake to be Square

I started a new project last month. I always had a weird half hour before work. My brain wasn't functional enough to read a book, but it was too functional to keep itself busy with the asinine CTV morning show. When they did a segment on a giant lobster being moved to an aquarium, I knew I needed to do something, before I drowned myself in my morning coffee. So, I started crocheting. I had hoarded all of my scraps of worsted, heavy worsted, and chunky yarn for no reason, and the collection was reaching absurd, Howard Hughesian levels. I needed a project to use them all up, and the logistics of planning a whole knit blanket were just too imposing at the time. My brain was still struggling with the semantics of why the tupperware collection still needed a box. And if it would be meta to put them in one of those big tupperware storage containers. Oh, and the mysterious crust in the fridge of incredible adhesive powers was bothersome as well. So, I turned to that classic, the granny square. With little to no thought, and a couple of segments of the Daily Show, you have another square. And another, and another, until you have a nice little pile. It's also nostalgic to remember which project each yarn came from, or when it was added to my stash.

I'm running out of scraps though, so I might have to go off and finish some projects in order to liberate some yarn. Or else buy more yarn, which won't be any help at all.

I think I have my priorities all mixed up. At least in baked goods, I know it's cupcakes first, now and forever. Just yesterday I mentioned Les Glaceurs, and today on a walk to Atwater Market, I found a place on Notre-Dame that's also in the teeny cake shilling business. This place is called Itsi Bitsi, and the cakes come with their own handy box. I tried the coconut cupcake, a tasty option. They certainly don't skimp on the coconut for garnishing the icing. I don't think it beats the Red Velvet cupcake, but that's just the addictive power of FD&C Red No. 40 talking. However, I don't see any peanut or nut-related cakes on their menu, which might just make it K-friendly. I shall have to find out. Right now, I'm going to call the cupcake race a tie. A delicious, delicious tie.

Please don't call CPS on me.

An old photo of the 'Stache I found, as a place holder for new content. 

Dear lord, I haven't written since the first? I didn't mean to be so neglectful. The past few weeks have been busy, but in the quiet, banal way that doesn't provide much bloggable material. Unless you really want to hear about my quest to find the perfect vintage curtains from Value Village. Or the discovery of a cute cupcake place in Old Montreal that serves adorable Red Velvet cupcakes. Or how many times I've seen the McGill logo at my job. 

Wait, *do* you want to hear about the curtains? I can take pictures, but I might have to clear off the desk first. They're from the sixties, and come in this horrendous, green exploded-houndstooth pattern.

Oh, and I've also developed a bit of a thing for someone at work. I thought I had finally ground such tender feelings under the jackboot of my bitterness. I was wrong, and finally admitted i when I realized I was clandestinely checking the work schedule. And making excuses to take stuff down to text. And chat to the fellow in question. 

I can be terribly dense at times. 

I would write more, but, well, it butts up against some of those weird blogging issues I have. Like, how much do you share? I know there aren't very many people who read my blog, and most of those that do know me offline. Chances are, they'll probably know the person in question if I ever talk about personal stuff. It was a risk I took when the Q situation went down, but most of the people I knew who read the blog knew what was going on anyway, and I kept a large chunk of it out of the blog. I don't like to out my secrets on my blog, even though I like to be as open online as I can, short of posting my Social Insurance Number. I try to write only things I wouldn't be ashamed to say in public. And a personal blog is more interesting the more, well, personal it is. However, as I know from experience, it can be weird to stumble across yourself making a guest appearance in someone else's blog, or find your anonymous secret revealed and broadcast. I want to find the right balance, something that's occasionally amusing, but won't lead to termination of employment or restraining orders. And I'll write more about it once I find that balance. 

Oh, and I still knit, I swear. I even have a bag of granny squares to prove I crochet!

Home and Garden

Here's a list of things I will do, in the interests of home improvement
1. Put Ikea furniture together
2. Hammer in nails
3. Use a power drill
4. Use anchors
5. Use a screwdriver

And here are those I actually do well:
1. Use a screwdriver

I have had to do all of them in the past few days. The results have been mixed.

Life AM: After the Move.

It's a truth Protagitronly acknowledged that moving sucks. It's annoying to pack- where does the bundt pan go? It's both round and bumpy! It's useless. It's annoying to lug things up and down the stairs, particularly armoires silly people blithely purchased from the New Rez furniture sale only to realize they weren't even going to provide a furniture cart. And it's annoying to unpack, when you realize you have to figure out how to hang things on walls when you have a pathological fear of banging things into walls. How would one manage a major drywall malfunction? 

And then there's the Ikea furniture. Allen wrench, my ass. 

Anyway, I've been pretty busy with that and running errands for it, so there's been little knitting or blogging happening lately. Fortunately, I met a woman at my job who also knits, which means a new recruit for the Knitting Club. 

Also in the plus column: seeing Dark Knight for the second time. I don't think it's a perfect movie, but I think it's the best super-hero movie I've seen so far. In spite of taking some liberties with the canon, it stylistically hews closer to the source material, or at least the source post-seventies O'Neill and Adams. What bothers me though is the coverage in the press, which now frequently runs a companion piece all about what the film is saying about the Bush administration. Read the rather unfortunate Klavan piece that started it all here, and then the NY Times follow-up. Now, don't be mislead. I'm a good little cultural studies student, so I know that context matters; that every movie, even the seemingly benign, has an ideological agenda; and that that ideological reading depends on a complex, fluid relationship between the art and the viewer. I read the books. I passed most of the courses. But it's this dogged insistence that every movie be projected through the lens of post-9/11 America that bugs me. Klavan's article was mocked in blogland, but it wasn't a wild connection to make about a blockbuster. I remember when 300 came out, and every review I read saw it as naked (rather, shirtless and oiled) propaganda for the Iraq war. I don't think the current mess hasn't had an effect on cultural consciousness. Rather, there are other factors, and simply focussing on the Iraq War as the only way to read new movies is, well, myopic. 

Department of Canons and Mysteries

Only one class changed my life in second-year university, and it managed to do so while showing me samurais getting skewered in the neck and rent boys getting screwed. I'm sure you've all guessed by now that class was Shakespeare on Film. I thought of it this morning when I woke up at 5:30 with my cat's paw on my back and his breath in my ear, and a line from a Rilke poem running through my head. Blame the lecturer. The first day of class she read Archaic Torso of Apollo to us, whose last bit reads

" and not from every edge explode
like starlight: for there's not one spot
that doesn't see you. You must change your life."

It was the last sentence. And I could hear it in Jenn's voice. "You must change your life." I must change my life? How? Would either my favorite masters student or sickly German poet please tell me? I do not know. This is all a mystery. I hope the change is something more meaningful than doing the dishes more often.

Also, a conversation with my roommate last night reminded me that movies or TV with believable, likable teen girls are rare. So rare, I'm trying to come up with a girl canon. So far, I have Daria, Freaks and Geeks, Ghost World, and both Buffy and Juno to some (very articulate) extent. If anyone has any other suggestions for the Girl Canon, please send them in.

Cram it, Katy Perry

Whenever I'm in Montreal I slide into a music bubble. What's going on in mainstream music? I suddenly have no idea. I'm still not sure who Hannah Montana is, or what she does. Or if she's not just a clever hologram deployed by the Italian leather-booted thugs at Disney. At least in Guelph, I had basic cable and was desperate enough to tune in to the Edge. In Montreal, I just put on podcasts and rent Russian action movies. When I do listen to music, it's either stuff I've scavenged from the superior music collections of my brother and my dad, or synthed-out eighties stuff I've downloaded in shame. I can't imagine how empty my life would be without downloading. I would be too embarrassed to go to the record store to fill the hole in my heart, a hole that can only be filled with synthesizers and fake hand claps.

How out of it am I? Well, when Madonna's Hung Up came out- the one that sampled "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) and I started hearing it everywhere, I just assumed Montreal was in the throes of an ABBA renaissance.

So, it takes a rare song to penetrate the fog of my ignorance. Unfortunately, Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" has done so, helped along by my So You Think You Can Dance addiction. Can she go away now? Not only is the song annoying- her voice sounds tinny and Pro-Tooled, the production's flabby- but her act bothers me. I don't mind when someone like, oh, Madonna plays around with sexuality. And it isn't that a failed Christian-rock singer is capitalizing on fake-lesbian chic that bothers me. Rather, it's her purposefully dim stage presence. I don't have much patience for the kind of little-girl antics that make women pout and stand all knock-kneed. It's not that it makes them look stupid stupid, it's that it makes them look like they want to look dumb. Which is just sad. And then she puts her hand to her mouth when she hopes her boyfriend won't find out about her girl-kissing ways, because she's just too naughty. The whole song reminds me of girls who make out with other girls not because they want to, but because their boyfriends want them to. No one but Focus on the Family's bothered, hetero norms aren't challenged, and only men are getting off. Ten bucks says most of the girls who'll make out in clubs to this song- and to whistles from their guys- will be raising kids in the 'burbs ten years on. Even the ones who think they kind of liked it. And I'll bet another ten that Katy is on some one-hit wonders compilation. Or maybe that's just what I hope.

Now, to get that taste out of your mouth, how about a fun dude-on-dude song?
High School Confidential- Carole Pope

Leaping Lemurs!

This capybara went on record as saying "Baroo?"

The Biodome is pretty much my favourite place in Montreal. Not even Schwartz's or Basha comes close, lacking as they do in puffins and capybaras. Want to know how much I like the Biodome? You see, like many a kinda-hetero woman, I have my wedding already planned. Instead of having a Vera Wang dress or tea roses every which way though, I only have two kind of odd desires. The first is that it must be at the Biodome. And the second is that the sloth will be our ring bearer.

Penguins already come with tuxedos, perfect for any wedding or formal event.

Yeah, so the ceremony might take hours, but it's going to kick ass. I still haven't decided whether the reception will be sorbet in the penguin area, or canapés in the Laurentian habitat.

Hyacinth macaws

So, every year I make a pilgrimage to the Biodome, where I check in with my old friends. This time I dragged a human friend, Frances, along. She got to hear me wonder the same questions I always do, like "What happens when one of the animals die?" "Do they feed it to the other animals?" "What would traumatize little children more- seeing a lynx eat Bucky Beaver or a caiman eat Zoboo?" Sadly, these questions were again not answered in the twenty-minute presentation "Les Secrets du Biodome" Frances and I attended to improve our French. My french must be getting better, because I understood most of it. Then again it's pretty easy to translate from the French "The capybara eats the placenta" when you're actually seeing capybaras. Eating. Placenta. The movie was more interesting on a fasion note than an educational one. The lovely Geneviève, our presenter, had those great cargo pants that zip off into shorts. The ones that always seem sexy on women... but only women in certain professions. Biologists, archaeologists, can all rock them and look like the fiery love interest of some adventurer. I, a lazy English student, always look like a comfy but sturdy turnip. Not to self: go all Single White Female on Gen-Gen's lifestyle. It will probably lead to face time with tamarind monkeys.

Porcupine up a tree.

The big draw for me this year were the lemurs, also known as John Cleese's favourite animal. I almost wrote Chevy Chase there, which is weird. One's American, one's British, one's funny, one... not so much. Plus, I'm quite sure Chevy Chase's favourite animal is his own ego. Cleese, at least, has better taste in movie projects and animals, as I found out yesterday. Lemurs are very keen-looking creatures, even when they're not jumping around the trees and just hanging out. Their big yellow eyes always look a little overwhelmed. Or maybe over-stressed, kind of like a student in the middle of exams. I sympathize. Since they're only visiting, their habitat is just a big shack in the middle of one of the hallways, done up to look like a Madagascan home, and you shuffle past the lemurs and then out into the gift shop. They seem to like to hang out together, and will clean each other like cats. Speaking of cats, don't tell the big guy, but I kind of want two lemurs of my own now. One for cuddling at each end of the sofa.

My lemur buddies. I've named the one on the left Margo and the one on the right Captain Franks.