birthday weekend 2013 - part i

friday night:

i headed off to vfmp's and from there we went together to meet his boyfriend at the theatre. before the lights went down i had an sms conversation with a girl i'm going on a date with soon, and was quite proud of myself for managing to transmit my sense of humour. apparently getting hit in the head wasn't all bad :P
in addition to the aggravation of having forgotten my antibiotics at home, my phone reminder went off loudly even though it was set to vibrate and that was horrifically embarrassing! paranoid, i held my phone's silence button at the ready for the next while and it felt like i was receiving tons of messages or phone calls... eventually i turned it off. after the movie, i turned it back on and there were no missed calls or messages. :S

out in the dark - it's an absolutely brilliant film, and does a fantastic job of portraying, in my opinion, a good deal of what makes israel tick.

like a time-bomb.

it's got an excellent story and covers the angles with deeply disturbing accuracy. every time security services opened their mouths i got chills! overall, i loved some of it, hated most of it and appreciated all of it. not the happiest birthday movie - not cathartic at all - but i'm very glad i saw it.

and then i had to rush home to take my pills.

---
saturday:

i wasn't ready to get up when i did, and the idea of snowboarding was too much. most of my morning (and it's barely stopped even now, three days later) was spent responding to birthday messages - which was awesome! i don't let people post on my facebook wall because i feel it's inappropriate and impersonal, and i've been rewarded by soooo many long catch-up conversations with people i care about and have been out of touch with ^_^

...

i read through wired's "guiltless gift guide":
i think they can drop the "guiltless" pretense, most of the items are just more stuff. it's cool stuff, to be fair, but very little of it is superior in any way to any other equivalents when it comes to being mindful of the planet. i'd have been very glad to see a real "guiltless" guide, but seeing a regular guide labelled "guiltless" is nothing short of offensive.
i'm also still very disappointed by their lack of a digital-only subscription and their physical promotional spam.

...

getting my opus card fixed / replaced at berri-uqam took about two seconds, i was a bit shocked when the woman turned back to me with a smile on her face and wished me well. "is that it?!"

as i purchased by bus tickets to saint sauveur i realized that if i wasn't going snowboarding right after brunch then i could have picked them up any time...

godmother picked me up from the station and we went to an awesome place in old montreal called olive and gourmandeau. it's super hipster funky with great food (two vegan options) and excellent atmosphere. after breakfast she took me to a skate shop to buy a bag for my snowboard - sweet! i quickly settled on a backpack with appropriate straps, so i can have the board on my back and only need a single bag for travelling ^_^

after another round of birthday messaging i stopped at subway for lunch on my way to the starbucks to work on my comics... the nutritionally well-endowed gentleman who works there always appears to be stoned, but this is the first time i've registered him making himself a sandwich as soon as he finished with mine. what a perfect job for a stoner!

on my way out i called fcmg to ask if she'd like to meet during the week, and she was all "sure! i can meet you in ten minutes!"
no, shit! so i flipped my plans, did some rushed shopping (subway's next to the supermarket), dropped everything off at home and then went downtown to meet her at cafe depot - i'm a regular there already :P

coffee and comics were great fun, with a lot of inspirational moments. additionally, she loves my space epic pitch (next project!) and was happy to discover that she knows someone who actually applied for mars one :)

one of the problems she had, and she was embarrassed to tell me this, was that she couldn't read one of the source texts because it's written in middle english. i'd told her that it's not easy, that you have to "relax" your linguistic rules, but while i can do that easily i failed to take into account that i studied literature for two years in addition to my being a poet...

as i'd read in wired that morning: "any communication - is a problem of empathy. you have to imagine yourself in the mind of someone who doesn't know something that you do." that's hard, man. last night i spent a few hours on modernizing the text, and while fcmg responded enthusiastically to the results i'll refrain from publishing it until i've reworked it to a satisfyingly poetic translation. not that it doesn't sound good, but i'd like to maintain the metre and rhyme as much as possible...

after our meeting i returned home to lose more time to once upon a time... omg that series is awesome. the writing is incredible! over the last couple of days i've found myself consistently blown away by the series, and towards the end of the first season (i have two episodes to go) it's become one of my top-rated series of all time. i've actually shouted at an ending for being an evilly clever cliffhanger...

i was eating dinner while watching, and as has become normal over the course of the past week i was eating insanely slowly... we used to laugh at tahoma for eating slowly, but now it's me taking an hour to eat a bowl of salad :(

i was hoping to meet with sagirl who'd just arrived in montreal, but she couldn't get a fix on her plans so i went to vfmp's to play thunderstone instead. we had a great time :)

---sunday:

we enjoyed an epic finish *just* in time for me to catch the bus and metro, and i headed home. there's something magnificently creepy about a parked metro train with the lights off in the middle of the night.

i got home ready for the deepest sleep, but instead woke up soaked in sweat. i dumped the sheet, showered, and spent the next few hours trying out different methods of not overheating. eventually i settled on moving to a cold spot every ten minutes... this has happened every night since, and it's very frustrating.

...

in the morning i had a chat with lipgirl, who wanted to know why i didn't even want to visit israel anymore. i gave a few reasons, but what i didn't say to her - i wrote it out and then deleted it - i'll share here:
it's so hard to deal with the barbarianism and that begins precisely at the point at which you join the line for passport control at ben gurion airport.
...
the psychologist i spoke to prior to my release from the air force warned me to make sure that the terrible things i experienced don't become a great stone around my neck, but no matter how much i made good on my life afterwards each and every negative thing accumulated... it's the country, the government, the lack of national cohesion, not the individual that has brought me to this dark point where i cannot bear the thought of returning.

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