( The Rules )

And here is a link to Chad, who started this.

Despite yesterday being both Canadian Thanksgiving and my birthday, it's a pretty boring 12.

( Photos! )

1) ALL PHOTOS MUST BE TAKEN ON THE 12TH OF EACH MONTH.

2) After you post your pictures onto a webpage of your choice (Livejournal, typepad, MySpace, Flickr, etc...) please post the TIME, LOCATION, and A SMALL COMMENT on the pic.

And a link back to the the creator: chaddarnell.typepad.com/runchadrun2/12_of_12/

( Pics )

Been listening to a bunch of new (to me) music lately because I am bored and have no friends:

( You don't have to click )

This post was mostly for my benefit -- my boyfriend isn't a music fan, so I can't talk to him, and my dad is like me in that he doesn't tend to get into music until about a year after the fact, so he probably doesn't know any of this stuff either. I've just had all these thoughts rattling around my head for a while, so I got them out here, and if I give links to free music in the process, so much the better.

I finally have a camera, so this is my first 12 of 12. Rules:

1) ALL PHOTOS MUST BE TAKEN ON THE 12TH OF EACH MONTH.

2) After you post your pictures onto a webpage of your choice (Livejournal, typepad, MySpace, Flickr, etc...) please post the TIME, LOCATION, and A SMALL COMMENT on the pic.

And a link back to the the creator: chaddarnell.typepad.com/runchadrun2/12_of_12/

( Pics )

Approximately six hours of the 48 hours of suck down! Only 42 left, about 12 of which must be spent at work.

Oh, good, it's snowing! Which means I'll probably be late for work.

(Steve, you bastard, I strongly suspect you have found this, so I'm leaving this entry unlocked, but I'm not friending you. How do you like my userpic?)

I also got a job this morning, at a restaurant. It's kind of weird --  I never get jobs where I have to actually interview. Also kind of weird -- I went into my pre-existing job this afternoon, and the other two people working with me had also gotten new jobs today. Heh. Pre-existing job is so screwed.

Kind of a rambly post.

1) My boyfriend randomly bought me a comic book. It was gift-wrapped and everything -- the tag on it said something about Valentine's Day, but he knows I hate that holiday and don't expect him to get me anything, and also it's fucking April. Weird. He also randomly bought me an apple. Just a single apple, because he knows I like green apples, but that I tend to forget about them and let them rot after I've eaten one or two. So I'm happy now. It was a Squee comic, hence the icon, and it's probably the first comic book I've read since those stupid Dragonball Z comics my ex-boyfriend had, which were only cool because they were backwards!

2) I didn't get sent on the Dean's Vacation like I thought I would. I barely scraped by in the class I thought I would fail, if only because the class (immunology) is an elective and I think the instructor was reluctant to give anyone an F in a freaking elective. And I got a better-than-I-was-expecting mark in the other course I took, which was crazy hard, so my degree is back on track. I have six courses left -- I just want to get them over with and get the hell out of there. School!

3) In an attempt to be productive today (I'm not used to days off) I went to the Canadian version of the DMV to renew my ID, which I need to apply for my passport (see # 4). It was surprisingly painless, and absolutely no line-up to boot. And! I got a new picture taken because the old one was from when I was about 19 and had really short hair. I tend to take God-awful ID pictures, but this one can't be any worse than the old one.

4) Applying for a passport is so much bullshit. Every address I've lived at, every job I've worked, and every educational institute I've attended in the last two years? Would you like a detailed sexual history, too? And if there was any period where I was neither attending school nor working, I have to attach a description of my activities during that time. What the hell do they want to know that for? "I spent four days in bed curled up in the fetal position, sobbing. Then I got out of bed, drank a six-pack of the cheapest beer I could find, and played Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem until my fingers bled." My boyfriend suggested I include a long list of euphemisms for masturbation: spanking it, jerking off, 'Googling' myself...

5) Further attempts to be productive led me to applying for several jobs today, because I doubt the stability of the one I have now, and it's a damn long way from my house. I applied at two places, and that was pretty much only to justify a trip to the liquor store, which is near the two places. I was totally expecting nothing, but one of the places called me within about 40 minutes to arrange an interview tomorrow. Fuck. I hate interviews. They're going to ask me about my strengths and weaknesses! And why they should hire me! And it's too early in the day to reasonably show up drunk to (yes, I've done that -- shut up).

Oh! And I finally watched this week's Gilmore Girls. Love!

Movies my boyfriend and I have watched since we both finished exams/projects on Tuesday:

Friday - this was his choice. He said it "has happy memories" for him. It had its moments.

Trainspotting - my choice. I love this movie. I hadn't seen it in at least five years.

Point Break - also my choice. My cousins and I were talking about the filmography of Keanu Reeves at Easter, and we all agreed that this is one is our favourite. I last saw it when I was in grade 8 and obsessed with Keanu, but seeing it now? It's the only movie in which I've ever found Patrick Swayze attractive. He looked pretty good walking around a beach with his wet suit half pulled down and his hair all wet.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off - because we have been monumental slackers over the last few days. And for some reason he thought that I'd never seen it.

Babel - meh. So very long, and it didn't need to be. I said to my boyfriend that the deaf Japanese girl storyline was completely extraneous, and he pointed out that, if you changed about three scenes, the kids-in-Mexico storyline could have completely extraneous - they could have been anyone's kids. Brad Pitt looked pretty good all aged-up and tortured though, and it'd be hard to make Gael Garcia Bernal look bad. And - I know, I'm going to hell for this - some of the teenage Japanese boys were good-looking.

Die Hard - I fell asleep during this one.

MirrorMask - it was gorgeous. But possibly not the best movie to watch late at night - very dreamlike.

Bold if I've read them, italicized if I intend to.

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) A bunch of you seemed to cut this one out of your list.
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82.Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

32 out of 100. There's a lot of Canadian literature on this list, it seems.

Meme from many people on my flist, even though music memes always give me the impression that I'm talking to myself.

List 10 musical artists you like, in no specific order (do this before reading the questions below).

My artists:
1) Blur
2) The Knife
3) Mouse on Mars
4) Bjork
5) Radiohead
6) The Stone Roses
7) Talking Heads
8) The Pogues
9) Super Furry Animals
10) The Flaming Lips

I'm a sucker for a good music meme. Wow! I have a long username.

R - "Randy Described Eternity", Built to Spill. Zach could have put this on his "new(ish) music for guys who like old music" mix for Luke. Boy, does Doug Martsch want to be Neil Young. (Sidenote: if anyone can find me a copy of their cover of Young's "Cortez The Killer", I will be forever in your debt.)
O - "Optimistic", Radiohead. I remember being locked outside Thunderbird Stadium waiting to get into a Radiohead show, and we could hear them doing the soundcheck with this song.
B - "Blackout Fallout", Polysics. J-pop from Devo/Brainiac worshippers. Of course it kicks ass.
Y - "You Take My Breath Away", The Knife. I'm showing signs of becoming dangerously obsessed with this band, and Karin Dreijer is rapidly becoming one of my favourite female vocalists.
N - "Nowhere", Ride. Shoegazer was a pretty limited subgenre, but it certainly produced a classic album or two.
M - "Medicine Hat", Son Volt. I love Jay Farrar's voice.
I - "Iron Galaxy", Cannibal Ox. Now no one can accuse me non-representation of the hip-hop genre. Plus this song rocks.
G - "Glim", Mouse on Mars. One of my all time favourite album closers.
R - "Running the World", Jarvis Cocker. I laughed out loud the first time I heard this song.
A - "Assassins", Lightning Bolt. Makes my heart pound.
T - "That's Really Super, Supergirl", XTC. A decidedly silly song. I won't listen to it if anyone else is around.
O - "One With the Freaks", The Notwist. I wish it were longer.
R - "Rubies", Destroyer.
I - "Innocent When You Dream", Tom Waits. My mom cannot look at a roast chicken without singing this song. She even tries to do a Waits-ish growl. It's adorable.

No links, because these are (almost) all hard copies. CDs, that is. Most of my music is not on my computer. Shocking, I know.

When I first started working graveyards, the silence really got me, so I'd listen to my discman. But as I've mentioned previously, my discman is huge and clunky, and my uniform has no pockets. I can wear a hoodie and stick it in the pouch, or, as I do more often, unbutton my shirt, stick the discman inside, and re-button. It looks ridiculous, and I have to keep taking it out and putting it back if I want to change a CD or go and deal with a customer. So I stopped listening to it. I'm pretty okay with listening to whatever my coworkers want to listen to -- we have a CD player there, and some speakers to which one of the girls hooks up her iPod. Her tastes run to the club-friendly, Top 40 R&B/hip-hop/pop-type stuff. Totally fine.

But.

Her playlist? Has a total of 14 songs. From what I remember:
- Nelly Furtado - Say it Right. I don't mind this song.
- Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous. I fucking hate this song. Like nails on a chalkboard, it is.
- Justin Timberlake - My Love. I like this song, I will admit. But this is some kind of weird-ass remix that cuts out the best part of the song (the first minute and a half or so, with all the fun percussion and "Hey"s).
- Pussycat Dolls - Buttons. Like My Love, it's a song I (shamefully) like, but remixed to the point of absurdity.
- Pussycat Dolls - I dunno the title. It's the one with all the beeping. Harmless.
- A Pussycat Dolls megamix. So we get to hear Buttons and the beeping one again, plus that odious "don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" one. Hoo-ray.
- Beyonce - Irreplaceable. I don't like this song. Why is Beyonce as famous as she is?
- Cassie - Me & U. I don't have anything against the song. This happens to be an a capella remix, which is sort of interesting, actually.

And a few other songs for which I don't know artist/title. In total it's maybe 40 minutes of music. She just puts it on repeat and tends to let it play about three or four times before shutting it off.

Lord.

Why does she even own an iPod? Seriously, 14 songs.

Even once through Promiscuous is enough. I really, really hate that song. By three times around, I was breaking out the discman, awkward and bulky though it may be. I couldn't be bothered changing discs, so I just listened to the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots about three times. Which is okay, since before last night I hadn't listened to it in close to a year.

So, am I just an unrepentant snob, or is this obnoxious behaviour on my co-worker's part?

Hee! The first spellcheck suggestion for 'Furtado' was 'farted'.

I got L.
Let Down - Radiohead
Like a Pen - The Knife
Life During Wartime - Talking Heads
Look After Me - Hot Chip
Live Bed Show - Pulp
Los Angeles - X
Leb' Wohl - Neu!
Life's a Gas - T. Rex
Lines in the Suit - Spoon
Lightning Strikes the Postman - Flaming Lips

I've been working as a cook and dishwasher at a Quebecois diner for a few weeks now. Poutine is big there. Biiiiiiig. As far as I can tell, poutine == love to the Quebecois. Now, I always thought poutine was disgusting (at least in theory -- I'd never tried it). Gravy is one of my most hated foods, after all, and while I do love cheese, I tried the cheese curds we use at work and was less than impressed. Rather tasteless and rubbery, very weird.

But of course there's a but. The other night, one of the waitresses wanted some poutine so the other cook made it for her. He made too much and she was bitching about it, so he was all, "So what? Share it with Robyn." I protested that I'd never tried poutine but didn't have the heart to say, right in front of someone who was about to stuff her face with it, that I thought the very notion of it was disgusting. The waitress is from Quebec, too. That's like insulting her mother or something! So I tried it and holy crap is that good stuff. Totally the last thing I need -- another incredibly fatty food that I find delicious.

So thanks so much for that, Quebec. If I gain a shitload of weight, I'm blaming you. And while I'm on the subject of blaming random geographic locations for my own lack of impulse control, thanks a lot for yam tempura rolls, Japan. Eating sushi could be a terribly healthy thing to do, if I stuck with sashimi and cucumber rolls and miso soup, but of course I have to go for the creation that's essentially a french fry wrapped in rice. And mayo. And I'm not really sure who I should be thanking for shimp crackers -- the ones I buy from the Asian supermarket are from Korea, though, so let's just say thanks, Korea, for making a crunchy, salty snack even more fattening than potato chips that just so happens to taste like seafood. Why can't we buy seafood-flavoured potato chips here, for that matter? Would that be gross? I can't be sure right now. We have wasabi chips, ketchup chips, onion chips, curry chips... why not fish?

Mmm, snacks.

Did I ever tell you guys that I have my very own Ugly Naked Guy? Except it's actually Ugly Naked Couple. Their bedroom faces my living room, and it's not like I'm peeping or anything, but they have about three or four cats, all of them adorable, who hang out on the window ledge in the bedroom, so I look at them when I sit at my desk, which is right by my living room window. I've seen Ugly Naked Husband naked before, but he's pretty heavy and his gut actually hangs down and obscures his genitals, just like Peter Griffin's many nude scenes in Family Guy. It's pretty funny. But I just saw Ugly Naked Wife getting changed now, and had no such similar luck. Eeeyuch. I could have lived without that sight. Also I know she saw that I saw her -- she turned and glared at me once her shirt was on. Awkward. But it's not my fault! Pull your damn blinds when you want to get changed, why don't you?

Oh, now I remember why I initially wanted to make this post. I want to keep track of books I've read this year. Rather than putting it in a Word file or a spreadsheet or something, I'm just going to put it here. No one has to read this, of course. It's just so I remember.

I have a Discman. It's big and clunky and sometimes I am ashamed of it, but it's lasted me a long time and it's very sturdy. A few months ago I was carrying it in my hand when I tripped over something and fell forward onto the sidewalk. I sort of broke the fall with the Discman, or it was the first thing to hit the ground, anyway. My hands and knees got all scratched up and I tore a big hole in my pants, but the Discman? Totally fine. A few barely visible scratches and it didn't even skip. So I've felt no real compulsion to replace it, but I still sometimes feel like I'm the only person left who doesn't have an iPod and that that is a bad thing. Like, this morning, I was coming home on the train and I was sitting next to this little old lady. She was watching me switch CDs and once the music started up she pointed to my Discman and smiled and said something to me. I couldn't hear her at first, but my first thought was that she was saying something like, "Oh my God, I haven't seen one of those since I was girl!". 

Because seriously, does anyone not have an mp3 player? Anyone? My dad has  one (that I bought him, actually). My boyfriend has one, even though he is so not an audiophile, and the battery actually died completely because he used less than once a month (he's offered to sell it to me, but it needs the new battery first, plus it's only 2GB and I have doubts that that would be enough for me). I remember reading an advice column a while back -- it was probably The Vine -- that had a letter from somebody who'd won an iPod in an office raffle or something, but didn't want it. The columnist advised them to, I think, give it to a friend who's iPod had broken. Like it was a completely foreign idea that anyone just wouldn't have an iPod, period. 

If anyone was wondering, the little old lady was exclaiming on my Discman. It seemed the height of technology to her, even when I pointed out all the iPods around us and told her that I was sooo behind the times. She didn't even know what the Discman was, or what it did.

Look at this kitten! I just want to cuddle him forever. I love his little white feet, and his pink paw pads, and his white whiskers. I have such a soft spot for black and white cats. 

Anyway, I am so very tired. My weekend went like this:

Curses. I wanted an "angry" icon, and I also want more fandom icons -- all I have now are my Invader Zim and Futurama ones, and one crappy Doctor Who one. Anyway, I thought of a way to cover both of these needs: a Rome icon! Of Vorenus! He's nothing if not perpetually angry and pissy. I couldn't find any good pictures, so this manly-bonding one of him with Pullo will have to do for now Maybe I'll do a screen cap later or something.

Damn, I may need a paid account after all. Fifteen is such a small number.

This post was actually an excuse to save this Sars Vine quote from today: "The prevalence of ignorant or lazy usage does not make said usage black-letter law." I love it, I need it on a t-shirt. It's something my boyfriend and I argue about all the damn time -- I'm no great grammarian myself, but I make an effort. He's all, "Democratic use of the language blah blah blah! It's used in popular vernacular why can't it be used in print blah blah blah!" We got into an argument a few months ago about an article in the student newspaper that used the phrase "could care less". It triggered a huge rant from me about how that completely changes the meaning of the phrase, and aren't these people, like, English majors? Don't they have editors? Come on! But he Googled both "could care less" and "couldn't care less" and came up with equal hits for each, and found some article stating that the phrases are used approximately equally, so why couldn't they print it? To which I could only impotently repeat my original gripe about it rendering the phrase meaningless. I'm no good at debating, even when I know I'm right.

It's snowing, so I'm not going to class. School is open, but it being on a mountain means getting there will be a bitch. The lecture is posted online, anyway.

I went shopping for pants the other day, which reminded me of how much I hate the whole "vanity sizing" thing. I hate sizing in general, really. I am about a size 8, at least in pants, and I'm totally happy with that. I'm not going to buy more of your clothes just because they fit me in a size 6. Just label things consistently! It's incredibly annoying to go into a store and to have no idea what size will fit me, because I'm not sure if any given store labels things honestly. I'm an 8, I should be able to pick up a pair of size 8s and have a pretty good idea that they'll fit me, but nooooo, I need to take sizes 6 through 10 into the change room with me. The pants I bought the other day are 7s, and they're slightly too big. I have a pair of size 10 pants that are too big for me, and a size 10 bathing suit that is too small. Angry! And then there are those stores designed for tiny toothpick Asian girls, where I can't wear anything smaller than an extra large. I am not a extra large girl.

I need a good "angry" icon. I'm a very angry girl, sometimes.

Man, I don't want to go to work. Environment Canada tells me it's -7 C out there. I know that's not that cold, but I'm a wuss.

It's very windy and my lights keep flickering. Not a big deal, since I'm about to head to bed, but I also want to take a shower before doing so, and I'm terrified that the lights will go off while I'm in the shower. It just seems so horror-movie that I know I'll panic and probably slip and fall, and possibly die. So if this is the last any of you hears of me, you know where I am: crumpled in an undignified postition in the bottom of my shower, clutching my razor, one leg half-shaved.