vicarious horror

 holy shit, inside is not something to play when you're getting ready for bed. absolutely, awfully beautiful limbo-like experience with a lot more holocaust trauma than i was expecting.

[passes out before completing the post]

our walk together to the store was as much exercising our game design legs as our physical ones. when we got home, mr smear played thief while i chatted with horseman, who's been building an interesting crypto protocol that i finally kind of understand. but then he spoke to me about a different one he's planning and everything got jumbled up in my head :P

we stuffed outselves on gd's vegan sushi for dinner, watching the wonder years and pausing to ensure that mr smear's familiar with the woodstock performance of with a little help from my friends, as well as the songs where have all the flowers gone and blowing in the wind, and closing with a conversation about the cringe that kevin arnold was so afraid of versus the intensity of the cringe that he generated in order to avoid it.

(i think it was during the first part of the dance scene that both gd and mr smear literally climbed under the table 😂)

and how teenage hormones make us behave like idiots.

...

by the time we got to dinner i'd managed to get mr smear's game starting with a randomly generated map, using a system i'm pretty pleased with and that's theoretically portable to my game as well ^_^

in spite of inside making my heart race, i managed to fall asleep pretty quickly and i slept surprisingly well. it's been a pleasant start to the day so far, i'm not sure what i or we are going to be doing but i suspect it'll be mostly indoors activities.

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...

addendum: anxiety diet

 the anxiety diet continues to be effective; i dropped below 77kg yesterday for the first time since my early twenties. scrapper's comment on saturday about expecting me to have learned to handle stress better is rolling around my head a lot.

oh, and i showed mr smear maynard taking down a drunk fan and continuing to sing. he's agreed that as long as he doesn't have to do mma, he's ready to get back into jiujitsu. i told him and gd that we'll look into that as soon as we're over the move.

chores and childhood

saturday:

i went to bed, got up a bit later to pee and caught mr smear on the computer... i warned him that that had lost him screen time, got him to go to bed, and then returned to bed myself.

i was in the middle of a dream when he woke me up to ask if his punishment time was over yet 🤦‍♂️

by the way, i have to note that he's been reading the wave and is really enjoying it.

when i eventually got up (i didn't get too much more sleep, unfortunately) we sat down to play some space quest v together, which was fun and got a lot of laughs until he decided he was getting bored 🤷‍♂️

i moved over to the playstation, and began playing nier automata. i managed to get through the first sequence, it was a lot of fun and the game world is gorgeous, but by the time i got to the save point i was feeling worn out...

mr smear's german friend came over for a few hours, while i played some more final fantasy vi.

in any event, the day was mostly spent quietly indoors. we were all exhausted.

yesterday:

after dropping mr smear off at school, gd and i took the bus to dizengoff center, then walked to the shuk. we enjoyed a cup of coffee on rambam street with no pressure, we picked her up a couple of bags (custom prints, she's happy with them) and a couple of nice t-shirts for me, i picked up some wired speakers for my windows machine, and then we checked out the book store looking for a gift for the mongoose's daughter (whose birthday we've missed, twice) and hit the jackpot - a large piglet plushy and a hebrew translation of winnie-the-pooh.

after we got home, gd went back out to meet up with urchin, so i had to pick mr smear up from school. i arrived there just as he was leaving the gate with a friend of his we've never heard of before, informing me that they were going to take the bus to his place and asking me to pick him up by 4pm.

so... that was a moment. i made sure i had the address, and that his friend knew that mr smear is vegan, and off they went, leaving me feeling a little bit anxious but very proud at the same time.

gd, however, didn't take mr smear's independence so well... to be fair, though, if we were in canada or south africa i definitely wouldn't have felt so safe about it.

i spent the next while setting up my new work accounts, and discovering that the cheap speakers i'd bought were terrible, and then gd and urchin arrived and we chatted for a while, and then gd and i left together to pick mr smear up from his friend.

he was fine, they'd had a nice afternoon. we took the bus home, picked up the gifts, then took the bus to the mongoose's. and discovered that his daughter already had the matching winnie-the-pooh plushy, but their copy of the book they had wasn't as nice so she'd been bored... on our way out i overheard them reading to her and they later sent an adorable picture of her hugging her new friend.

all good ^_^

from there we went to market vegan for dinner. i had the hand-made couscous, which i really didn't enjoy the texture of, and they shared kebabs which were delicious, but there was an embarrassing incident with mr smear trying to spit out a mouthful of food because he didn't like the peanut butter sauce 🤦‍♂️

we got home pretty late, had a struggle to get him to do some of his homework, and then just before bedtime he decided he was hungry again.

ay carumba.

today:

another difficult day getting mr smear ready for school. while saying goodbye, some guy walked his kid past me and the child wet-coughed openly into my face. i was literally stunned, and i really wish i'd said something because i spent my entire walk back fighting with the shitty parent in my mind :/

i took the speakers back for a refund, then ended up meandering until i found myself at a nice coffee shop on ibn gvirol, where i stopped and took care of a bunch of chores.

it feels good crossing things off my list.

it didn't feel good learning that mr smear had absolutely refused to cooperate with his teacher until the third lesson of the day :(

then i walked home via the mall, where i picked up some urgent groceries and found a pretty decent bluetooth speaker that was on sale for even less money than the cheap ones i'd returned. they work well, although the windows machine itself is pretty shitty so they're not as good as they could be...

mr smear had left school with a friend of his who was performing in a piano recital at the conservatory. i was told that he would be ready to be picked up around 3.30pm, but on my way there i saw that his phone was on the other side of the city, and when i checked in with his friend's parents i was told that the recital was only scheduled to begin at 5pm, and that they'd have mr smear home by 6pm.

color me frustrated.

i'd been in the middle of a meeting with horseman, who was trying very hard to explain a complex crypto scheme of his, and i took the opportunity to make myself a coffee and reset my brain a little. in total we must have sat for about two hours on his presentation, arguing non-stop about how all the mechanisms work together, but by the end of it i think we had a good handle on the design and we'd also both learned a some things about crypto that we hadn't fully understood before.

mr smear eventually came home around 7pm, just while i was talking to our kibbutz cousin for the first time in ages, and we dived into dinner because he hadn't eaten anything all afternoon. he apparently had a really good time, though :)

we had a long good-night chat with my mom, some of which was stressful (regarding aliyah), and now that mr smear's in bed and i've knocked this post out, i think i'm going to start winding down for the evening.

performance

yesterday:

the big deal in the morning was getting gd to her follow-up therapy session (i mean, it's been more than a year since the war broke out and this was her third actual meeting). while i waited for her, i worked a bit from the hospital food court. she arrived afterwards feeling rather proud of herself - with good reason - because as part of unpacking All The Things for a new person she realized that she's been through a lot of crazy stuff and she's still trucking.

...

the work day was pretty "standard", although it was interrupted by a message from mr smear's teacher informing me that he and his bully had had to be separated physically. i called him and asked him what had happened, and he told me his version, and i sent an angry message back to his teacher.

only to discover that his version of the story had been missing some important details.

it turned out that he'd done the instigating, and "happened" to wander to his bully's side of the class, allegedly not realizing that he was really close to his desk. so the bully got upset and yelled at him to go away, at which point he decided that he should stand his ground because - as he put it - "technically, he doesn't own the whole class".

🤦

parenting is hard.

i made it very clear that he was in the wrong and that he's supposed to be helping me get moved to a different class, not tricking me into making a fool of myself to his teacher.

but, in the evening, i couldn't help myself: "did [your bully] really cry?"

"yeah, he always does when he doesn't get his way"

i feel like there's a grey area in there where i'm allowed to enjoy this mean-spirited moment with my boy.

...

we had vegan shuwarma for dinner, but gd apparently overcooked it because it was a bit too tough and chewy for both me and mr smear.

mr smear was feverish last night at bedtime. gd medicated him as much as she could.

today:

4.30am rocket attack, i slipped and skidded on my way to make sure mr smear was up and on his way to the bomb shelter and hurt my lower back a bit. it's manageable, but uncomfortable.

i neither know or care who these godforsaken "houthis" are, but they're making me genocidal. after the last jew in yemen passed away recently, after yemen successfully and completely ethnically cleansed us, i honestly don't understand why we shouldn't simply erase it from the map. i keep imagining god's hand wielding a giant hand-saw and just sawing that hellhole off the rest of the mainland.

...

we all struggled in the morning, and it was a rush to get mr smear out the door and to the school on time to prepare for the ceremony. i returned home, finished my coffee, and then gd and i went to the school to bear witness.

i made sure to get a (relatively) good spot to record mr smear, but i had no intention of taking any other photos or videos. unfortunately, it looks like the other parents saw me getting ready and assumed that i was doing the class photographer thing, and therefore didn't feel the need to take photos themselves, so i think i might have pissed a bunch of them off :P

anyway, mr smear was GREAT. i was so proud i was shaking, and he was cool as a cucumber! that was awesome.

the next forty minutes was a full-on show by their class, and i have to admit it was pretty impressive for a bunch of fourth graders. one little boy was hilariously flamboyant, and i *knew* (subsequently confirmed) that it's the same kid who sings (in mr smear's terms) "cringey" songs all the time :P

that kid definitely stole the show. otherwise, mr smear did all the things he was supposed to and everything went smoothly.

afterwards he convinced gd that he was too sick to stay at school, but i strongly suspect we got played because he literally skipped and ran all the way home.

i headed out to the office, and spent the rest of the morning fighting with aws credential caching. after a big leftover lunch (the vegan shuwarma tasted much better, somehow), we figured out a workaround for the credentials and i started making some actual progress.

then, half an hour before i was supposed to meet with the VP R&D of a company i've applied for, everyone sat down for a status meeting. i couldn't have been more obviously in a rush to leave if i'd tried, but fortunately i only ended up a few minutes late...

as soon as the meeting was over, i surreptitiously sneaked into the stairwell and let the guy know where i would be, and he met me a few minutes later. i was a bit nervous because it wasn't *impossible* to see us from my office floor, and when a guy walked into the area we were sitting in wearing a similar shirt to my boss he laughed at how terrified i looked :P

anyway, it was a really exciting meeting. i love what they're doing - my current employer could make good use of their services - and it sounds like they're looking for people like me. we agreed broadly on a way to make a technical challenge meaningful for both of us, and i left with a solid sense of alignment. 

let's see how this goes.

the rest of the afternoon was successful, the bones of the project i'm working on are complete and i've got a day spare to make it meatier.

...

oh! at some point during the day i realized why the crypto money hadn't hit our bank account! it's because i'm an idiot, and i withdrew it to my old bank account that i closed down. after a proper bit of panic, i spoke to my bank (who were surprisingly responsive for christmas day) who assured me they'd return the money to the sender. i then tried to get the sender on the line - luno - whose support chat is entirely "AI" automated, and figuring out how to submit a claim was hard. i eventually managed to get it done, though, and hopefully i'll get the rather sizeable sum of money back within the next week or two.

...

i headed home just after dark, picked up a couple of things on the way, and came home in time to make my son finish his math homework (which he continues to claim he already did, but the dashboard says otherwise), take turns showering and still have time to play his first "chanukah gift" - pikuniku - together.

it's a lot of fun!

i was really pleased that mr smear now knows some of the chanukah songs and joyfully sang them along with me ^_^

i read a little bit of the magic pudding to him at bedtime, after we'd spend about half an hour being amazed together by chino moreno and maynard james keenan's screaming abilities, and hopefully tonight won't be disrupted.

next steps

 "work from home". today, noooot so much.

i did catch up on a little sleep last night, with some epic dreams that slipped away pretty much the moment i opened my eyes. i was still quite tired, though. the morning started off alright, i got mr smear to school in good spirits*, and was planning on heading to the clinic to support gd at her doctor's appointment when my phone reminded me that i had an upcoming interview.

* on the way, mr smear informed me that he doesn't like his singing voice so much (he has a great singing voice!), so he decided he wanted to play beethoven's 9th symphony at the school's chanukah ceremony in two weeks' time and could i please print the sheet music for him. while i was picking my jaw up off the floor and making a note to myself to take care of the printing, i stepped on a small, squishy piece of dog poo.

the interview went pretty well, i think, and i'm a lot more interested in what they're doing than i thought i would be. at the same time, the company i interviewed with poorly yesterday evening scheduled an in-person interview for next week, so 🤞

i also managed to sort out the payment for gd's cannabis license, but only after realizing that they didn't send a broken link, rather that my relay software splits form data on the equals signs and breaks links. so i'm going to have to fix that, and fast...

i tried to get some work done, but i was tired and distracted. just as i was trying to rest my eyes for a few minutes before leaving, gd began another coughing fit. a little less rough than we're used to, but still rough, and so far *tfu tfu* it looks like the new meds and saline nebulizing are helping.

i picked mr smear up and took him to his hebrew tutor, got a bit of work done, and brought him back home, to both of our excitement discovering along the way that tapuchips are making salt and vinegar flavor now ^_^

while i did get some work done during the afternoon, it was rather a messy mixture of work, random distractions and helping gd herd mr smear - he spent most of it on his keyboard, which was great but not conducive to high levels of concentration on my side of the table.

the new, uhhh, play therapist? showed up in the evening, she's very sweet. we all introduced ourselves and talked for a bit while mr smear got over his shyness, then we had a very serious drawing competition, and then i got a final bit of work done before evacuating the living room and helping gd with the dishes.

good dinner and the simpsons, a rushed bedtime ritual but not unpleasant, and when gd went to bed i played through another section of shadowrun returns. oh! i finished count zero yesterday**, and i'm now taking a break from the sprawl trilogy to check out the honest truth about dishonesty. so far, so good.

** what was particularly interesting about the re-read was just how relevant it remains in spite of some of its anachronisms, and just how much it has influenced so much other literature (including video games) that i've loved. count zero still holds up, it's a brilliant story executed exquisitely. i felt that the tying up of loose ends felt a bit rushed, but the ideas were exciting and i really enjoyed the adventure alongside the characters.

oh! it's quite late. i guess i should probably go to bed.

metal meital and the shitty flute horror

yesterday:

it was father's day! and i got a really nice card from my family, and my wife made a delicious curry for dinner ^_^

the work day started off well enough, but the release went south and there was a lot of bashing heads against walls. additionally, i was exhausted - i thought my three-month-old sinus thing had slowed down on saturday, but it was back pretty hard (but only during some parts of the day?) - and at some point i was falling asleep at my desk and my coworkers expressed concern...

...

oh, and yesterday was the very worst kind of cheat day. i ate a big lunch, half of gd's leftover challah, more snacks than i should have, two bowls of curry and rice, a really nice salad, a beer, and then ended up snacking around midnight with chocolate/halva and dried fruit.

today was much better, but nowhere near making up for all that :P

...

after an early dinner, i bussed over to tahoma's for a really nice salad (they've been heavily influenced by their time in japan, both in culinary arts and in that tahoma's learning to read japanese books) before the two of us headed out to the tmuna theatre. it was my first time there in almost 13 years, and absolutely nothing has changed. we went to see meitav sherman, who has an amazing voice and - so far - generally good music, but as impressive as she may have been* it was the band playing with her that really blew me away. and between all of them, it was really cool seeing a new generation of talented musicians on stage with a sizeable crowd.

* she's very young and obviously new at this kind of performance, but it was a fun show and she said some unsayable things that were quite entertaining

today:

the shitty flute recital really wasn't as bad as we anticipated (us parents, gd had to be at the dentist), but mr smear stole the show, and not in a good way. he was supposed to be pretending to play along with everyone else, but he was so bored he spent most of it just sitting (quite noticable when everyone else is standing) and doing something really gross that i don't even want to write about. this from a kid who won't eat his lunch if he sees another kid do anything unseemly, like eat with their mouth open or not blow their nose enough.

it was painfully embarrassing to watch live, but even worse when one of the parents posted a video in the parents group where it's practically impossible to look at anyone else :$

...

work-wise, it was a long, really hard day and it was full of distractions. we eventually figured out what we'd been doing wrong for half a day, and finalized yesterday's release, but there wasn't really much sense of satisfaction. when i finally got to the work i'm supposed to be focused on, i was - just like yesterday, *strangely* - so unreasonably tired that i had to take a nap.

to be fair, i haven't slept much in a couple of days and i've been eating badly and drinking either too much coffee or not enough.

...

on the way into the school in the morning, i got into it with the security guard and the caretaker who both insisted that we've always needed a teacher's note to take mr smear out early. i was halfway home from the recital when i realized that i'd sent a message to his teacher requesting a note, but that his teacher was on vacation. so i walked back and found the woman who was looking after them, and one of the class assistants. they assured me that mr smear would have his note by the time i arrived to pick him up.

by the time i arrived to pick him up, mr smear did not, in fact, have a note. and the security guards and i had words. very intense words. i was furious with him, because he's a complete moron. he doesn't like me much, either.

so i whispered to mr smear to go to the other gate, walked all the way around, trying the whole way to get hold of the secretariat (they don't answer their phones or emails), and took him out from there via the human being security guard with whom we've never had an issue.

...

mr smear and i talked about what had happened in the morning, and i showed him the video. i hope that his contrition and embarrassment sticks, and that he really doesn't do something like that again. after dropping him off at his hebrew tutor, i went to have coffee but the usual place was full, so i went to the other usual place and found a seat. i was supposed to be working, but i needed to have a discussion with my mother about her aliyah process. hopefully she'll get useful answers to the questions we're now asking.

the way home was *hot*. like, oppressively, painfully hot. and we were almost home when i saw a message from his tutor informing us that he'd left a notebook behind. so back we went, and then back we came again. it was *hard* out there today.

...

at least by the evening the weather had calmed down a bit, but i couldn't take mr smear to the climbing wall because we needed to get him new shoes. we walked to the usual shoe store, and they had nothing for us, so we walked to azrieli. long story short, we got him a new pair of shoes that we're only somewhat confident are actually good for him, we replaced the screen protector on the old huawei he's using, i bought a decent pair of headphones (jabra elite 4), we picked up a stack of printer paper (for drawing, it's the best value for money), and we got mr smear a good falafel for dinner.

aside from getting through lots of daily quests in adventure time: bloons, and posting this, i have dishes to do before i go to bed. and i'm not sure i have the energy to do them.

...

very exciting news from this morning: i spoke to gco, and pitched an idea i had yesterday. he was excited that i *get* what he and his partner have been trying to achieve, and i hope that this morning's chat sets the ball in motion for something big.

unusually me

yesterday:

a very positive start to the day, getting mr smear to his fight camp on time.

mostly meetings, with me forcing a retrospective that felt appreciated by most of the team. a good start to sorting out potential on-call rotation issues. very little time for my own work.

leaving the office early and coming home for an early meal with my family before heading south.

efrat gosh in levontin 7 with tahoma - an interesting catch-up, a very intimate performance that really blew me away, as i was simultaneously quite emotional about being in a show in levontin 7 for the first time in about twelve years.

getting home late, showering and snacking even later.

today:

3am mistakenly looking at facebook and seeing a post recommending that a tel aviv family consider relocating to cape town, finally going back to bed an hour and a half later

rough and rushed wakeup, but mr smear being pretty cool

a really good chat with his instructor when dropping him off

a surprising conversation with gd about spirituality.

meeting up with my cousin's kid for coffee to discuss career options, a sudden and dramatic plot twist into a romantic adventure story

arriving late for work, being dropped into an unfamiliar production issue for a customer. an emotional rollercoaster of an afternoon, with gd getting on the wrong bus and picking up mr smear late, and mr smear continuing his struggle to get out of the fight camp, and me getting lost trying to figure out all the pieces of the work puzzle, and then getting news that my nephew just received his british ancestral visa and is finally able to join his mother and sister in london, and then hours trying to decipher truly pathetic documentation (google's envoy) and figuring things out with trial and error (with the AI assistance being the opposite of helpful), finally being inspired to ask a different question and hitting the jackpot, then a loooooot of debugging implementing the solution and eventually leaving the office late, but in time to eat with my family, and feeling exquisitely exhultant.

the evening was great until bedtime, i tried to have a conversation with mr smear and it went south (for no obvious reason), and then gd and i watched the third episode of the new fallout series. it's full of fan service, even if i feel like the pacing's a bit slow it's really inspired me to get back into it.

rock on!

örmagörd! gonna see foo fighters in cape town (^_^)

freakin' AWESOME.

highs, lows and the navigation thereof

"efficient, organized, neat, and systematic"? i'm trying, mom. i'm trying. but the last two weeks (?!?!!!) have been absolutely insane, they've seen me hit real lows for the first time in many years and some seriously real highs as well. i don't know where to begin The Great Posting, but i've got to start somewhere.

considering the fact that i'm overwhelmed by all the crazy shit i'm doing right now, my journal might be reduced to a long list of barely intelligible items.

oh, well. have a performance instead.

the rush - part ii

[... continued]

it's monday morning and i have a busy schedule to prepare for... but i've got to finish at least some of this, and last night i felt absolutely horrible. i'm feeling much, much better now.

---wednesday:

at 5am i woke up and had a flash of inspiration - i had an idea a while back and with the tools that i've been exposed to at work i now have a good way to do it!

it was a nice morning but a dispassionate one. i spent it managing tricky fixes and realized late that i'd forgotten to put my lunch in the fridge. fortunately it was okay.

on wednesday i received a mandate to run loadtesting: i've been doing that since. i like breaking things "the right way".

my shoulder and neck began hurting. a man in the bathroom standing right behind me to take a drying towel raised his head to smile at me in the mirror, which was super-creepy. i had pre-performance nerves, but i had no time pressure as it was my first day since i started that i'd gotten enough hours done before 6pm; the power of a short lunch :)

i was on the metro already when i realized that i'd left the tripod at home. when i got to le dépanneur café i found a really dodgy substitute and for the first half of the evening i didn't trust it to hold, so i held on to the camera with my hand and it shook every time i cramped up :(

i was not impressed by my team. i'd asked them to record video using their phones so that we could get different angles, and they couldn't be bothered.

my performance wasn't fantastic, but it really wasn't bad. things were rather awkward though, because our host left rabbit out of the evening and we're all to new and inexperienced to know that we can and should be shouting "hey! what about rabbit?!" :$

kyra shaughnessy sang a few songs. she's AMAZING (and you can hear her for free). brandon wint and nasra adem's poetry was beautiful, too, though there were some pieces i just couldn't connect with.

the guy working le dépanneur café was entirely unwelcoming.

i made a note about "gd and i talking properly" but while i suspect that our conversation involved the nature of reality and the importance of written words and memories it's been too long to recall :/

we stretched a bit and i sent off some thank yous for the event and suddenly it was 2am...

at least google play music works on ipad!!! even if you do have to search through iphone apps to find it.

---thursday:

it was a good, slow morning. i was nominated for the ice bucket challenge.

i arrived at work late and felt slowed down. it bothered me that the cleaners were taking care of our little coffee / microwave room at lunchtime, their timing could have been better. i spent my extended lunch hour working to set up a new website for the throw poetry collective and connect all other services and things.

i was very busy with taking pride in my work; i came across something that was written badly (using sync functions in node is not a good idea) and spent ten minutes rewriting it... only to discover that the undesirable behaviour had side-effects that the previous developers were using and so fixing it broke everything.

#$!@.

oh gods, a guy one cubicle over was being a total douchebag about als awareness when one of the girls was talking about it. it was a struggle to keep my mouth shut.

kickboxing: a tough training session, my first holding my hands up muay thai-style and my biceps were burning. towards the end i developed a serious stitch that was prolonged and extremely painful.

i got home and learned that my mother's bank account has been emptied by hackers, and after we talked about it we're convinced it was an inside job between the bank, her mobile provider or both. it was a freakishly sophisticated attack and there really wasn't much she could have done to protect herself. except maybe use a bank that double-checks suspicious activity with as much fervor as it double-checks legitimate activity.

i was exhausted when i got home. i caught up with SxS, did some small things online (like completing the first volume of saga for gd) and went to bed just after discovering that my laser hair removal treatment wasn't done along the line *i* shaved. i'm going back this evening for a redo, i can't believe how dumb the technician is.

[continued...]

not so much resting or relaxing - part v

[... continued]

---thursday:

thursday was consistently crap, beginning with the electricity being cut when i was mid-shave. at least the water was still running, 'cause that would've been way worse. it was a beautiful morning that was properly soured by bnw's husband posting an ugly piece of anti-zionist propaganda on my wall, and what followed would only be (relatively) resolved much later and only yesterday did something positive come out of the whole thing. i don't need to convince you to love israel, i just need to convince you to avoid media bias and misinformation. more on that later, or some other time.

because my phone wasn't working i wasn't sure if the bank had called me to collect my card, so i went *again* and was disappointed *again*.

---on my way to work i bought a headset because i'd read up on my microphone problems. for the iphone 4 there's really not much you can do about it (i tried cleaning the various mics). i made a call i'd been needing to make, the headset worked perfectly for about five minutes and then *IT* stopped working. wtf?!?!

just then, just after i'd tried calling back three times and resetting with no luck, gd contacted me upset because [okay, i'm going to have to leave this out]. when i called her and she couldn't hear me and that made things worse i flew into a silent, seething rage. i furiously messaged her - messaging is NOT an appropriate medium for furious communications - and then told my boss i needed a couple of hours to get myself a new phone. i was originally going to head downtown to the apple store, but he sagely pointed out the bell office across the road.

score!

i walked in, silently suffered the salesman's manipulations and examined my options*. i finally walked out with a two year contract that costs $5 more (for an extra 2gb of data), a two year warranty that includes water damage (i've learned my lesson) and a shiny green iphone 5c.

* there weren't many, really. and i was a little annoyed about aota having taken a new phone with my current contract and leaving me with a refurb, but later i'd remember that the company was paying my phone bills so we're definitely square.

...

örmagörd: in the two days that i've had it, i've realized just how much poorer my quality of life was for the bad performance and utterly shite connectivity of my previous phone. perhaps naming it gir was looking for trouble? the new one is subject b.o.b. and his cover, which is on its way, is a scanner from the purchase menu :D

of course, as i called gd on my way back to the office it started raining. #$@!#$#@$%%!
and she was working, so she was annoyed because she thought it was a pocket dial.

i spoke to my mum quickly, and for that i needed the headset i'd bought in the morning so at least it wasn't a complete waste. i felt a little awkward when i remembered that i was using the corporate network for a personal call, but i don't know why that should bother me.

later, when i got home, i'd be intensely grateful that itunes restores backups so beautifully. it's an absolute blessing!

---i stayed really late to make up the hours, switching from phpstorm to enide because the former is incredibly annoying to use. the latter's just like any flavour of eclipse, only it can't perform a proper search through javascript code. i don't know how that got through, so now i don't know which ide to use and i'm fairly close to reverting to a combination of notepad++ and vi. that should tell you everything you need to know about the current state of tools available for software development.

...

i briefly logged in to crunchyroll when i got home. i love what they've got, even if their selection is rather limited, but it bothers me that they don't have dubbed versions available. i prefer subs myself, but for gd it's too much of a strain :(

i spent the night doing organizing things and finding and customizing images for my phone. its appearance is important to me. it looks really cool now and with the cover it's going to be magnificent!

---friday:

i woke up from crazy dreams. my notes from those dreams were: houseboat saving a book, making servants' lives difficult, conflict in israel over three celebrities posing together, mom pointing them out but i didn't understand

i woke up to see that protoplasm had been to a wolfmother concert. i'm pretty damned jealous. and my music collection's only getting larger as the salaried weeks go by :P
speaking of which, i've just discovered google play music, so gd and i can shared my itunes music library. AWESOME!
well played, google. well played.

[continued...]

not so much resting or relaxing - part ii

[... continued]

on my way back to work my phone was bugging out again. i could hear well but nobody could hear me. that's very, very frustrating; now i know how ghosts feel in stories.

at least my back was feeling better. i left with sasquatch and we talked all the way to lucien l'allier where i got off to walk to gd's friend's tattoo parlour / gallery for a vernissage. i arrived early, grabbed a mountain dew (i'm developing again, it's a thing) and chewed the fat with a couple of interesting people. the performance was decent, the music mostly beautiful.

vfmp joined just before the music started, gd arrived just as it finished. we all went to p.m. together, with gd embarrassing me a little on the way. some things are meant to stay private! anyway, dinner was delicious but after i'd been singing praise of p.m.'s vegan-friendly options, after we'd begun eating, i suddenly registered for the first time that my favourite tofu meal might have a light coating of egg around it. it was all awkwardly downhill from there.

of course we went to yeh! afterwards.

...

due to a peemergency, gd and i hurried home soon after that. we started watching a vlog of supertongue's and ended up arguing about whether or not her offensive religious views will be tolerated in our house (she's planning on coming over at the end of the month). she's become a fundamentalist atheist and what she has to say about other people's faiths is aggressive, absurd and uninformed.

it angers me when atheists extol the virtues of science without understanding that science has no basis from which to judge the subjective. you're not objective, anti-religious crusaders, you've just fallen into a different ideological trap. faith is healthy, religion is bad, and you need to leave people be if they're not interfering with you.

"wow! your logical arguments have convinced me that my god is a fantasy!" said no-one, ever.
there's no need to be a jerk. don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you.

---last saturday:

i got ten hours of sleep that i *really* needed. i dreamed anything from awkward family reunions to a cross between aliens, hannibal (from the tv series) and resident evil (our hostage was dressed as a power ranger).

i read the latest four posts of the last halloween, and it just put me right back on team abby! shit just got real.

i spent some time organizing slam poetry events. i'm now an official part of the collective and it's nice to be appreciated :)

having excitedly talked to gd about battlestar galactica, i bought the first part of the mini-series from psn. while it downloaded i played some good tekken and then some ffix; i didn't win the battle i'd been fighting quite like i wanted to but i'd attempted it so many times that i just rolled with it. while i played i lay in a way that stretched my back and i think that helped considerably.

the afternoon was overheated but good.

[continued...]

this week's points of interest

between this piece on nikola tesla and the posts on driving the tesla and another reason why elon musk is a hero, these oatmeal articles are all awesome and inspiring.

jaguar's land-rover's HUD is also very, very cool.

from a medical point of view, 3d-printed casts are almost as great as the first approved exoskeletons.

...

you might also find some of these free microsoft materials helpful.

finally, i'm shocked to say that a pop star has actually written a very clever op-ed.

supertongue montreal introduction - part i

so we didn't get her montreal bagels or smoked meat. and the poutine apparently wasn't all that.

the itinerary:

friday the 13th

x 6.40am pickup
x home, shower, food
x keys for duplication
x underground downtown
x plateau / mont royal record stores
x boxing
x party

saturday

x blood donation
x brunch
- foufounes électriques
x the village

sunday

x atwater market
x old montreal
- parc la fontaine
x mont royal
x tam tams
x l'artère

the details

friday:

i knew it was going to be a rough weekend, but i'm pretty sure it didn't need to start with four hours of painful restlessness; my brain as much to blame as my restless legs.

the cruel, wet friday morning saw me yawning while i waited at the bus station, sitting with everything i needed to be productive except motivation.

introducing supertongue to my place, non-stop debating.

a phone call from revenu québec informing me that my file had been processed, which i already knew because they'd sent me the amount owed.

going to gd's work to pick up her keys, making copies for myself.

trying and failing to walk downtown because a horrible downpour forced us underground.

jugo juice shake fail. supertongue speaks french fluently, apparently the guy working there doesn't.

both exhausted, we headed back to my apartment to rest. and watch 20 years of ufc, so it was only a kind-of rest. it's a must-watch!

i was disappointed to see that instead of the weekend being a shitty day followed by two decent days, it would be two shitty days followed by a decent day. not cool.

i went to gd's apartment - now dubbed "home" - to test my new keys, and passed out on the couch. a nap becomes the deepest slumber when there's a time limit! i woke up still in dream-space, with reality seeming distorted and in a distinctly altered state of mind. so much so that i questioned my own sense of self as i made my way to the metro.

i was upset by my kickboxing coach posting the following:
"how a female dresses is her advertisement. if a female shows half of her body, she's asking to be disrespected."
really? if you think that, you're an asshole. what i really wanted to ask him was if his wearing fighting shorts is his way of asking to be disrespected... unfortunately, i can't say anything without messing with our instructor / student relationship so i have to keep my disrespecting his opinions to myself.

gd was going to join us at the fights, and she'd told me she'd be done in forty five minutes so supertongue and i went to her work to wait for her. forty five minutes turned into ninety minutes, and then gd became impatient with our impatience and it was supposed to be a fun evening. if i had known beforehand we would have gone straight there and asked gd to join us, and she probably would have bailed because until we were almost there she didn't actually realize that we were going to see live fights and not just watch something at a sports bar :S

we struggled to find dinner on the way, experienced taxi drama because the cab we ordered didn't arrive even though his gps signal said we were on the same intersection and eventually arrived after intermission, having missed three of my gym buddies in the ring.

$%!@.

at least there were some good second-half bouts.

saturday:

supertongue and i went to hot sauce, a lesbian party, to introduce her to the scene. the bouncer was a short, dumpy angry girl who tried very hard to keep me out in spite of the fact that i was accompanied by a woman and had paid entrance. the music was eclectic and eardrum-damaging loud, but overall the party was good and we spent a fun hour or two on the dancefloor.

the nightbus was simple enough, we ran a stupid-a.m. poutine mission (i picked up deliciously greasy salt and vinegar fries) and we crashed at my apartment around 4.30am.

...

at 9am i got up half-asleep. i was excited to see the first pieces of work on my comics, then woke supertongue up and we took a long metro ride all the way to radisson. napping well along the way.

jesus, the toilets are badly situated! the designer of the mall should be seated on the sherbrooke end, fed fast-acting laxatives and kicked hard in the shins as he gets up to go.

my first canadian blood donation on behalf of vfmp was friendly and pleasant. and i was so pleased that i didn't pass out! the point of the donation was to be part of an effort to convince the canadian government that screening sexually active male homosexuals is stupid.

there was some awkwardness with supertongue and the guys, but not too much. we headed out before them to meet up at aux vivres, and we'd almost boarded the metro when i realized that i'd left my jacket behind. that was close!

we visited a record store on mont royal that gave me the wanna-buy blues.

aux vivres: the food was delicious as always, supertongue and i went halves on blueberry pancakes and chana "sandwiches". there was decadent overeating, funny chatter and a gorgeous blonde waitress who seemed quite into me; i wanted to wingman for supertongue and see if i couldn't refocus the waitress' attentions but i don't think i have what it takes :P

we went to jean talon market, milled around and then decided to split up and rest because we were both exhausted. i woke up just before gd's station with a start as the metro jolted sharply before stopping, otherwise i might have missed it :P

i didn't exactly rest, but i did end up feeling much better. hummus on top of chana on top of supertongue's mother's amazing home-made hummus seemed like a bad idea, but i only thought that through after eating :(

it took a while to wake supertongue up by phone, and we agreed to meet up at berri-uqam. when i left i realized just how tired i was and worried that my lightheadedness was caused by too much post-donation exercise. it was a gorgeous post-rain dark-blue dusk.

we visited a really cool little live acts pub across the road from the station, then walked around trying to find a cash machine. the village was disappointingly quiet, so that sucked, but we got to see a bit of a great performance that was part of les francofolies. we walked all the way up st laurent, seeing rory macdonald win his fight along the way, and arrived at mont royal quite late. plan b (the bar) really was our plan b.

and that was the end of our night.

*my* night ended with ice cream and chocolate before bed.

sunday:

in spite of sleeping well, i was still buggered. gd and i had a good, late morning while supertongue didn't answer her phone - i was just about to go over and check on her, worrying that she hadn't made it home or something, when she finally responded.

my mom and i had a fight over skype - i think it was over how i'm dealing with my employer's silence over my papers.

i carved up a watermelon but had to abandon it to pick supertongue up from the metro; it was a glorious day, and the spores kind of made it feel like it was snowing. we demolished the watermelon when we got back.

supertongue and i had an argument with gd's friend who'd come over for a haircut, who's an anti-vaxxer. gd kept to the sidelines and although things got pretty heated i think it went okay.

i took supertongue for a walk along the lachine canal and through atwater market before we headed to old montreal, where she decided that she does, in fact, want to move here. it was a great day to visit the old port, and we caught a bit of a science show for kids that was a lot of fun. and made us both feel good about our french :P

[continued...]

down the line linkage

yesterday afternoon was hot and sticky; at least today has chilled a bit. i went to gd's, we rested, then headed to the weekly kalmunity event at les bobards. some of the first half was very cool, and some... well, let's just say we didn't make it to the second half. a couple of the performers really sucked, one of whom recited an angry, somewhat incoherent #YesAllWomen piece over chilled reggae.

ugh.

on the way back home, gd and i discussed details of our living together, figuring out what we want and how we'll manage everything. once i'm earning again things will all be pretty trivial.

...

it was a decent night's sleep with only one incident of us being all elbows and knees - fortunately nobody got hurt :P
we looked at a few apartments advertised online this morning, and i've taken photos of mine to sublet, and now it's linkage time.

okay, let's do this.

---fails

instagram's latest update is horrible, too many options and too much control for simple users like me.

top ten reasons your api sucks and what you can do about it

why working as a programmer can be trying sometimes

cool new stuff

twelve ways to teach kids coding sounds like a very good idea!

live skype translation sounds brilliant! only, if it's using bing will the accuracy be comparable to that of facebook's translations? 'cause those are totally crap.

tile is shipping - neat!

graphene? the new silicone? it sounds pretty sweet.

plaster casts are a thing of the past.

security

end-to-end gmail encryption? quite frankly, it sounds to me like we should simply avoid writing anything that might be sensitive in an email.

peter sunde has been arrested. the old world is still beating us with a very big stick :(

environment

here's a thought: an environmentally responsible supermarket that also handles curation. nice!

reactions to obama on carbon emissions: fifteen years? can't we go faster?

there's hope for solar power yet! according to this article, and the fact that solar roadways drummed up enough interest to keep their campaign open for another month and they've already raised double their initial target.

living architecture being thought about seriously? that's very, very exciting indeed.

astronomy and aerospace

ooh! a discovery about a new class of potentially habitable planets: mega-earths.

the dragon v2 is a very cool step forward :)

xkcd's self-fulfilling prophecy: hacking old spacecraft

sex

the dark art of seduction? you mean, the dark art of sexual predation? this is ugly and psychopathic.

at least victims can buy a wearable panic button now.

pinched nervous - part one

oh, man. nobody i need to speak to today is answering their phones. is a little professionalism too much to ask?

my main issue is with the company i've signed a contract with. over two weeks have passed, and it doesn't feel like things are proceeding. they're not talking to me - and right now my contact's not answering her phone - and if there's a real problem then that means that i've just spent two weeks not looking for other work. my bank account is a ticking time-bomb and this state of not knowing is incredibly stressful.

---saturday:

it took us forever to leave the apartment for p.m., we were both hungry but kept getting distracted. i'd taken my umbrella but it wasn't raining, which i hate. i suspect that i lost it before returning home, because i can't find it anywhere now. i really hate rain :(

p.m. was delightful as usual, and we were both surprised at the size of our appetites! we followed that with yeh! for dessert; their sorbet was brilliant, but i'm not sure it was worth the aggravation caused by the insane crowd inside.

the level of pain in my shoulder and neck had increased considerably over the course of the hours we were out, and i could barely handle the walk home. i went to bed early because i couldn't handle anything else, and woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night in agony.

---sunday:

i was a little better in the morning, but i tried reading and was too sore to be able to absorb china mieville's poetic writing. i took myself off to the clinic to register myself, there was only a three hour wait so i went home to do it there.

on my way i realized that what i was suffering from was a pinched nerve around the area where i have a slipped disc. a #$@%&*% pinched nerve!!! what a pain in the neck.

i took my b12 and d sublingual tablets simultaneously, which feels a bit weird but i can't see why that's not a good idea, and headed back. i stopped for a quick bite at the subway next to the clinic, which must be the dirtiest subway i've ever been in. it's only about a hundred meters from another one, so next time i'll go there instead...

the clinic's waiting room was a zoo, filled with noisy kids and half of them were hacking and wet-coughing without covering their mouths. of course, their parents were ignoring them. except for one, who was singing "old macdonald had a farm" repeatedly in an attempt to calm her infant. at one point i couldn't take it any more and stood outside the entrance where i could barely hear names being called. i hated that woman with every fiber of my being.

gd arrived a few minutes before i was called in, and she had a fit about all the coughing. she found the box of face masks which was hidden away, and we learned that "we can't force sick patients to wear them" translates to "we can't tell people they exist or advise people to use them" in receptionist-speak.

the doctor tested for neurological damage - haven't had that tested in a while - and of course my situation had improved dramatically in the three or four hours since i'd registered so i couldn't really demonstrate why i'd come in the first place. right? excellent :/

i joined gd at the second cup next door, which was disappointingly out of soya. when she'd finished her drink we went back to her place for munchies and a failed attempt at watching horror flicks. gd's really into paranormal stuff, i just wasn't in the mood.

i had a chance for a very short nap and was pulled out of exquisitely deep sleep to go see hilary jane perform at l'alizé. the weather was fine when we left the apartment, but as we arrived at our destination's metro station it became cold and wet. gd wasn't at all dressed for this and we had to take a taxi - fortunately diamond taxi's app works well.

---lina gatineau has a voice with incredible potential, only it's in dire need of some training. singing hallelujah jeff buckley-style is ambitious for anyone, and her performance was cringe-worthy :(

hilary jane and her funky 80's-style dance was a lot of fun, and her fantastic voice was only highlighted by the previous performance.

the wastelanders are amazing.

---it was still a bit wet when we left but considerably warmer, warm enough that gd was willing to go support her friend who was doing burlesque for her birthday. we hit the village, where they've recently closed off the street for the summer, and went inside. the show itself was disappointing - there were only two short bits in total. the first was pretty cool, but her friend who went on second didn't impress, and i suspect that the enthusiastic applause she received was more for it being her birthday.

gd introduced me to a bunch of her friends, some of whom were cool and some of whom were awkward. she was standing next to me and talking to a friend of hers who's transsexual - and a bloody impressive job she's done too - and i rested my hand on gd's back only to find another hand there already.
then i got awkward.
one of her friends started talking to me later when gd had left, and i amused myself greatly when he asked what i do and the first thing off my tongue was "i'm a writer".

huh! how about that?

i mean, i've done a lot more writing in the last half a year than i have programming, that's for sure...

---so after a very queer evening we went home; gd was freezing even though it was 19 degrees, so when we walked out of her metro station i gave her my t-shirt to wear over her mini-jacket. i'd been wearing my "follow me until you die" syndicate shirt and couldn't stop smiling as i followed her home.

...

an ubuntu update messed up the chrome installation on her computer, which is really weird and very frustrating. i gave up after reinstalling chrome but i'll have to figure this out soon or re-install the whole damned thing :(

[continued...]

big moments - part ii

[... continued]

the slam:

there is something incredibly special about having a group of friends supporting you so large that they take up half the place. every time i got up i felt like i had the home advantage, which was powerful, heady stuff!

the first piece i did was the slam. i turned the third line humorous by doing it in the voice of the caterpillar from disney's alice in wonderland, and pulled out all the stops with the rest of it. there was a lot of finger-snapping and laughter, and i stepped off to crazy applause.

the satisfaction from that moment turned to confusion when the judges all scored me really poorly. so poorly, in fact, that i was surprised later to hear that i'd made it into the second round.

the feature poet was perry visionpoet divirgilio. he's almost as big as his words, it was fantastic listening to him!
follow him on twitter
follow him on youtube

for the second round i took a bit of a risk. i took the microphone off the stand and crouched down next to it, eye-level with the audience. i deepened my voice and, having all the time in the world for such a short piece, slowly performed signs in the dead of night.

the first few moments were awkward for me as the first lines got a lot of laughs, and i'd been hoping to set the tone an octave darker. but i felt like the rest of it did the job. i finished, paused, stood up to put the microphone back and walk off the stage. not as much applause, and the scores... well, they were worse than before.

i guess the judges just didn't dig me. i felt a bit better about things later, when one of the other poets came up to tell me that what i'd done was really powerful. at least that.

so, to summarize: it was a wonderful evening with amazing performances by most of the competitors. i'm extremely proud of what i did even if it didn't get me onto the team. those who did make the team were all amazing, especially rabbit who took first place.

and aaa had come for the first half and left without any drama, so that was cool too :)

[continued...]

big moments - part i

okay, i need to focus. i think. it's been a strange and surprising few days.

---friday:

there's nothing like being late AND forgetting tissues when you're all snot-nosed :(
dinner at p.m. was very decent.

---saturday:

i slept much better than the night before, there were a couple of minutes of rls worry but then it was fine.

we woke up really early, and while getting ready i got pornkings - amour in my head. i came home, slept a bit more and then tuned in to bioshock. i got through a little bit of it, so far i'm enjoying myself.

---so jerry said "don't do it". of course i'm going to do it.

dragon coins is super-addictive, except for the bit where it takes over a minute to get past the splash screen and each screen change costs another 15-30s. the lack of offline play is discouraging and the friend system is disquietingly weird. but aside from all that - it's a wonderful game!

---horseman had invited me to his community centre's talent show, and i managed to get there only half an hour late. unfortunately for me, it was pitch black in the auditorium and i had to stand at the back for about ten minutes before my eyes adjusted enough to find a seat.

i was taken by surprise by quite a few of the kids - they're really talented, and it was exciting to see them getting a chance on the stage.

lesson learned: no tissues in back pockets. my back pocket was more hole than pocket and i looked like i was trailing toilet paper or something :$

horseman and a friend of his walked and talked with me for a while; it was nice and sunny but awfully windy. i headed to gd's to meet a friend of hers who'd come for a haircut: he was really awkward around me, apparently he was intimidated. i don't know what that's about.

we left for my place, and the weather suddenly went from annoying to ugly. gd was very unhappy, in the way that most montrealers get very unhappy about the end of winter. just like with everyone else here, my opinions on the weather aren't too welcome but she calmed down soon enough. i've written a poem about it but i'm withholding it until i feel it's more complete.

it was too late for takeout by the time we got home so we both had frozen meals and sat down in front of the rest of amadeus. it's a wonderful movie, even if thoroughly historically inaccurate.

we put on tekken, enjoying some indescribably perfect moments, then went to bed.

---sunday:

it was a great, slow morning to a gorgeous, warm, sunny day. combot training was too rough for gd, but regular vs battles with her are fine. we were about to leave when i heard that my mother was having a very un-mother's-day moment, her car having broken down on a highway far enough outside of cape town... i was concerned, but relieved to hear that there were people on the case. i went to godmother's for coffee and to wait for news from my mother.

i learned that yin has finally found a job in vancouver - working in a liquor store. this was a perfect piece of news to hear before explaining to my aunt and uncle hate that i've just been employed by a company that builds infrastructure for the porn industry. uncle hate enjoyed that bit of news far more than i'd anticipated.

the good news was that my mother made it home safe and sound, chased by rather unfortunate news that there's some family drama going on in south africa with my late uncle's legacy. we all know that it's bullshit, but it would be nice if that bullshit sorted itself out.

i had to run to meet gd at the metro - she'd been having some family drama of her own, her mother's developing dementia and managed to really upset her children who'd made every effort to be nice to her for mother's day. i had to wait longer than expected and let dragon coins keep me company.

the quick stop at my place took longer than planned, and we arrived at gd's with an hour to cut my hair and shower before rushing off to the slam finals.

[continued...]

i don't even. part ii.

[... continued]

---sunday:

i enjoyed a good wake-up, though it was a rainy day and i went through it to the walmart to pick up a yoga mat. pulse had been talking about the importance of colours, and i was amused to hear that if i want to focus on my upper back i should go with green. i have a thing for green, so that's no biggie. there was a single yoga mat left in stock. it was green, odourless (i'd been warned about chemical mats) and apparently eco-friendly. so that was easy! as i walked to the check-out i received a message informing me that pulse had gifted me a $25 discount on yoga supplies from some online source.

why was the world making it feel like my birthday?

there was a problem at the check-out with the card reader. i was so offended when, after a couple of failed attempts, the cashier grabbed my card and began rubbing the chip as if we were in the nineties. i *told* her it was the reader, not the card. before she could do any damage i thanked her for her efforts and found another counter. my card passed through first time and i left with an image in my head of the first cashier as a kid blowing into a nintendo cartridge.

i went supermarket shopping, forgetting to make change for the laundry, then hit the gym to train. i was specifically going to meet the guy who joined us for yoga last week because i didn't have his number and the instructor was coming in later than we'd agreed. he didn't rock up at all, and instead i worked on the punching bags. i worked really hard, really well and for a long time; so long, in fact, that i didn't leave myself the time i'd intended to return home, shower quickly and return with my new yoga mat. suddenly the instructor had arrived and i'd only had a few minutes' rest. we began the yoga class.

my arms and legs were kinda tired after all the work on the bags. that made the exercises particularly difficult, but i pushed through and was as satisfied as i was sore by the end.

i had a short time between yoga and horseman visiting, really just enough to shower and eat and maybe rest a bit. instead of the latter, when i got home i found a message from aaa waiting for me. oh, i thought. we're going to have the talk.

i called her up and was surprised when instead of the talk, she was inviting herself to the slam! oh, shit. i couldn't think of an inoffensive way to end things in that context, so i remained polite and unenthusiastically told her i'd see her later. i started stressing about the potential drama, already planning to take gd out for a drink after the slam to explain everything, and was discussing the situation with supertongue who's a bit of a drama expert. she told me that i *had* to call aaa back, and i'm really glad i listened!

because i took a moment to compose my thoughts, called her back and told her how i feel. i was relieved to hear her say that it wasn't just me - so i wasn't being an ass! very sweet. we agreed that dating isn't working, but that we both like each other and hanging out is cool. it was actually the nicest "we're not going to date any more" talk i've ever had and we were both laughing for half of it. that was cool, i immediately felt much better, and just then horseman arrived for a tekken session.

we played the new tag tournament, it was a lot of fun but not as competitive as usual. both our games were off but it didn't matter :)

as we left for the slam i stressed about getting dressed, and halfway there i recalled that i'd intended to shave. shave! my beard was looking a bit scraggly. and pulse's comment about presenting my poetry with respect still ran in my ears. but there was no time for that. there was just time to grab a quick bite at la pantere verte and arrive to sign up.

i'm sorry, said my buddy as he greeted us at the door: we've changed the way registration works this week... didn't you get the memo? all the slots are taken, the only thing open is the open mic.

DAMN! i was so disappointed! i signed up for the open mic and made sure he understood that if there was an opening for the slam that i wanted it instead. a slow hour would pass before he could inform me that someone had dropped out, which was an enormous relief :)

we sat down with pulse and gd, were joined by bnw and had a really good time! i was really excited when pulse gave me some insider information that the guys at the company i've been interviewing with are just as excited to have me join them - i don't know if she's exaggerating because she's being super-nice but i'll take it ^_^

we enjoyed ourselves until aaa showed up, at which point things started getting a little weird. i was sitting between everyone and the stage and pulse, gd and aaa were sitting in a row with aaa next to me; i kept thinking "past, hopefully future and present" and both myself and gd, who was being respectfully considerate, were having trouble deciding where to look at any given time.

then the evening began. i was wearing my syndicate shirt, amusingly showing "follow me until you die" to the girls because my back was to them; i was uncomfortable specifically because i couldn't keep an eye on things.

some of the open mic pieces were pathetic, one of them was a surprisingly dramatic improvement by the guy who i hated on the open mic when i judged. still not amazing, but he's at least heading in the right direction :)

...

the slam began. the first guy up was someone i quite like, though his piece left a bit to be desired. my name was announced, and i whisked my bundle of nerves up onto the stage.

1. i should've raised the height of the mic. i'm an idiot.
2. i needed more confidence. my piece deserved more confidence, and now i feel like i let it down.
3. in spite of my shaking and lack of power, i blew the first dude away, was received with heartwarming applause and the mc was so impressed he joyfully fist-bumped me as we passed each other.
4. the judges seem to like it! certainly better than last month.

everyone at my table was thrilled when i sat down, and i turned to look for the scores. as i did so i felt a pair of hands on my back - i stiffened, knowing that it was a victorious "pat on the back" from aaa and sensing that it was a lot more sensual than it should've been. that was our first physical contact after three dates and an ending, and it was totally unappreciated... especially with gd right there! after that i noticed that something was going on between gd and pulse, and a few minutes later they'd disappeared. my phone began to vibrate with messages from gd and there was far too much for me to say in such a short space - as soon as the first round was over i phoned her.

when i heard her voice i was both touched and terrified; i apologized profusely and we agreed to have coffee in the morning to talk it all over. on my way back to the table aaa passed me to say goodbye. her work was done (she didn't say that, obviously), she needed to go.

#$@!. couldn't she have left first?!

...

during the break vfmp and his boyfriend showed up to take the girls' place. much less dramatic :P

mc june went up as the feature for the night. his hop-hop's all french, but even though i could barely follow the words - never mind the poetic meaning - the man was enthralling. the performance was amazing, powerful, obviously clever, and his beatboxing partner who joined him at the end was just brilliant.

moments before the feature, i was informed that i'd made it through to the second round. score! i was thrilled ^_^

i'd prepared the quebec immigration song for the second. i'm really, really, REALLY lucky that i was called up towards the end, because after hearing the first two poems i knew that it wasn't nearly strong enough. fortunately, i still have advice memorized and i decided that it would have to do.

about a minute before my name was called i felt something in my chest harden. it was something akin to anger; a sense of purpose, and rightness. my nerves were blasted away by it and i jumped onto the stage, reset the mic's height and cleared my head.

oh - my - gods. i have never commanded an audience before, but i now know what it feels like. i stared into the darkness and emptied myself into my words, each one flying out precisely. there were laughs in the right places and finger snaps, and the response when i finished was overwhelming. what unbelievable elation and pride! what a reward for finally getting my shit together on stage!

i took fourth overall (when that was announced there were actually a couple of boos, and not from my table ^_^ ) and a couple of the established poets not only made an effort to catch me to introduce themselves but one of them was excitedly talking about us hopefully going together as a team to the nationals. i hope, i hope, i hope that i've made it into the finals next month!!!

...

it was pouring with rain when we left, bnw and i headed to the metro together and stopped halfway at a cool bar to dry off with a couple of drinks. we had a fun time telling hysterical stories and discussing the evening, and when the rain relaxed and we'd finished our drinks it was time to go home.

---from the moment we said goodnight, i couldn't stop thinking about gd. i was practicing speeches in my head and fretting about all the things that could possibly go wrong, planning apologies and explanations well into the night.

all this was wrapped in ecstasy, a very real high off the evening that was so strong it was shocking!

---monday:

sleepless before a date with destiny [i wrote that on the way there]. i picked up my laundry, it was the most beautiful, warm, misty spring morning that would turn into a hot - over 20 degrees hot - sunny day. a fantastic day for extremes, i thought, and i couldn't imagine how right i was at the time.

gd's name is the french version of a character out of greek mythology; i wasn't sure if looking up her story was a mistake or a treat, but it was definitely educational.

...

we met at her metro station, and walked and talked for a while until we found a good place to eat. a sweet, cozy diner-type deal, there wasn't anything vegan on the menu but the waiter managed to sort out a huge, delicious off-the-menu special anyway. the coffee was good and we were having a lot of fun, though a lot of our discussion was decidedly inappropriate and the waiter wasn't embarrassed to chime in every now and again because he could hear everything we were saying. i would've been offended but the attitude was totally good :)

we took a semi-romantic walk down to atwater market and around the area, then to her apartment. we talked for ages there too, culminating in a first kiss that,

quite frankly,

i will never forget.

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