A Strange Arrangement

Someone else is leaving me for the west coast.

My editor and i polished off sake and bottles of wine last night. It was like being on drugs when we watched the blizzard in the cold yellow parking lot light fly a million directions into the night, like sparks of snow with poisonous trails whipping behind them. Inside the cozy abode, we downloaded a lot of music, broke my dollar store wine opener and had to venture out into the snow again to get a new one, smoked a pack between us, and marveled at an old Valentine he made for me now stuck on the fridge.

Now, if only he can secure accreditation for Sasquatch, we will still get to spend more summer together.

She Left A Week To Roam

i drove out to the mountains alone.

Painkillers, Fleet Foxes Americana, sun shining on my face, windows down.

i ate lunch at the foot of the mountain as the old Canadian Pacific train passed by. i drank strong illy coffee while people bought strong cheeses and loaves of bread.

i miss being alone.

Poison

i have been passively letting things happen and passively letting time pass. It's been three years.

Now i don't know what i am doing again. i want to be able to let things go. i don't want to miss things that no longer exist.

Invisible, hanging there in the sunlight.


still an unpacked suitcase...

Don't You Know That I'll Be Around To Guide You

After two weeks of partying, i am sick and hopped up on cold and flu pills. These little pills that bleed red when moistened layer my world with surreal haziness. When this happens, i take more of the red pills, because i don't want this detached world view to subside.

...

i came back recently from the Canadian west coast. i miss my best friend. i miss the cherry blossoms and the mountains. i miss the ocean and the damp coldness at night.

Reading week and the Olympics also collided with my week-long jaunt. It was madness. But i saw so many of my friends, met many new ones, drank so much beer and so many martinis, ate so much vegan food in so many vegan restaurants, listened to so many records, walked so so much, picked up my cover story for the Vancouver edition of the paper i write for, and was happy just to be marking papers while he sat across from me writing memos for his latest case.

Sometimes, i wonder if we are able to be better people if we are with the right company.

Love In You Over The Soundboard And The Phone

Notes to Kieran by cy

There'll Be No Milk As Sweet

Cold nighttime sneaking into empty apartments of an old heritage building is a nice way to unwind before Christmas. It is even nicer when it is with someone who can make you remember that though things are bad, it isn't all shit.

Black Pepper and Wine, Smoking On the Balcony

We sent our guests off with beers and cigars for the road. i love that we all live so close to each other these days - i can finish a beer and 2 cigarettes walking from your place to mine in the brisk nights.

Put Your Hand On Your Heart And Show Me

i won't believe you until you put your hand on your heart by cy



(alfred) + (monome) + (5 gins) + (late night Wednesday) ----> (coughing out a lung) + (fever and chills)

i am getting so fucking old.

Got Lonesome Fuel For Fire

Insomnia. It's been a long time since i've woken up in the darkness and couldn't sleep again. It's been a long time since i've been able to remember the way things were.

i'm listening to a capsule of the 00's right now, wide awake but getting sleepy. It is reminding me of so many things. i used to listen to Camera Obscura and Jens Lekman and Interpol, did i? i just found an old copy of the Believer shelved in my apartment too. Old like when Elliot Smith died. Old like i used to watch Subterranean on Sunday nights when we stole satellite signals from the States. Old like the indie shows and beer. Old like when we used to be sick of being in love. Old like when i would still organize my ipod. Old like when i'd pick up and leave. Old like when i served tables and ate loaves of bread. Old like when the breeze would float through my window and make my record player dusty while i read thick books. Old like when he took off his jacket and laid it on the wooden ground for me to sit on in the humid Ironwood while M. Ward played. Old like when i used to write and was alone.

i'm old enough to miss things. Or at least get nostalgic for turning on the bright lights. The sun looks like it might come up now.

...

Today, i watched the campus with a chance acquaintance and some cigarettes. He told me that i need an adventure.

i know.

The Unfamiliar Is Right Below Our Eyes

i woke up this morning beside him. i fell back asleep. When i woke up again, i didn't remember what happened the past weeks and past days. And when i got out of bed, everything came back - all the confusion, the bad feelings, the sadness, the embarrassment, the complete loss of all the things i thought i could do.

i almost threw up in the bathroom.

The layer of snow on the cold city made everything so surreal today. It matched my dejection and apathy. When i smoke in the little hovel by the science building, i can watch the quiet and white-dusted campus like i am watching a silent film. Everything looked sad today.

My heart actually hurts.

Freedom Is the Mastery of the Known

All summer, i've been staring out my window, watching people get stuck in the shallow waters of the river on their colourful, rope-tied rafts.

i am inside my apartment, watching the beautiful youth and summer pass me by, floating along with beers and no life jackets.

A few more days until judgment day. And then this Hell can end.

All Wrapped In Bones Of A Setting Sun

“I can see the

ocean. I miss you.
I’ll call you
tomorrow after my
phone is set up.”

i am almost cried dry. It’s that fucking song or the grocery isles, or when i close my eyes and inhale what i think is you. It is definitely the sushi stand that is now closed with a ripped-out fridge and concrete dust floors, and now i drink your tea and eat alone. i don’t know why this is happening because i knew you were leaving.

Watching the Warm Poison Rats

There has been a lull here, and there. So i suppose the lull has been pretty constant.

It won't stop snowing where i am. i've never had a problem with the snow or how it likes to visit the city every now and again in the months of April, May, and June. But this year, "Fuck off." i have used my space heater so much that it is now broken. Next to the broken heater and un-shoveled sidewalks, i think about Barcelona. i would sit on the terrace and smoke packs of Marlboro Lights, drink cold white wine, eat avocados, and talktalktalk. At night, i would run out and watch the djs spin and the old bars would serve tall gins. In the afternoon, i would sleep in past siesta because of the night before, and because the heat would slow things down. Grocers always fresh, Sundays always closed, days always long, little streets narrowed with heat and architecture, vintage and parties and music and art and popsicles all the time.

i will not be able to go anywhere this year. i have spent all my money on something responsible. And i have to stay and study for the big one. This dark hole that i live in is also under a rock. i can't wait to crawl out.

...

Last night, a man found me and told me that i was mysterious and beautiful. i watched him smoke a lot of weed prior to the comment, and i think that he wanted sex. But it was still disturbingly nice to hear - i don't go out anymore.

What Happens On the 13th?...

...it is still happening. i am marking the undergrad finals. i knew this pile of exams would eventually haunt me after the madness, so as i was composing the final, it seemed that inditement of a narcissistic bonus question would be quite appropriate in maintaining (regaining) my sanity. Indeed, it has become more for my enjoyment now than for their marks and well being. It seems to have served both purposes.

i realize some of them shouldn't have spent their talents in bacterial biochemistry and physiology, as there are clearly better ways for them to use their mad skillz. Enjoy the wit.

Spectrophotometry and Yip,
Genomic expression is hip.
Lab reports are delivered on time,
She doesn't nickel and dime.
She's the grandmaster of CMMB,
Rocking around with Hynes (the emcee).
Enterotoxic pathogenic pneumococci,
Aseptic tequnique and she doesn't bat an eye.
- JM



Cynthia, la gentille tuteur de TP,
Ne m'a jamais saque,
Bien que mon anglais no sait pas parfait,
Et que le premier lab, je ne l'ai meme pas rappe!

J'ai done passe un excellent moment,
Meme si parfois j'ai en du mal a me mettre dedans,
Et que je ne les ai pas toujours rendu a temps,
Les "lab report," elle les a toujours corriges gentillement!

Merci Cynthia,
Je ne t'oublierai pas,
Car grace a toi,
Cette matiere je ne la raterai pas!
-JP



CMMB443.
Lab of bacteria.
Our TA is Cynthia.
She has long black hair,
Very pretty, and about us she cares.
Adorned with many rings,
I love those funky things.
-DL

And some limericks.

A limerick...By EW.
Ode to my laboratory instructor.
My TA, miss Yip,
Is cool, fun, and hip.
She taught us a real neat lab,
All the while she was so fab.
I'll miss thee, miss Yip!



There once was a TA named Yip,
Who was oh-so-incredibly hip;
Her labs never got boring,
For this we're adoring,
And wish we could leave her a tip!
-NJ

And when i am done this, and submit their marks and file away the exams, then it is time for the Fake Blood, red lips, and high heels.

Bones Floating In The Sound

It has been cruelly disagreeable as of late. i have not seen the light of day, the pleasing nights, my charming friends, or a good scotch in a very long time. And it continues, one painfully consequential task endlessly linked to the next, until December 13th.

And then, i will sleep in, tucked under my covers. And i will cook a wonderful meal, lit up with wine and tea and candles, listen to forgotten cds, read absolutely non-scientific literature, smoke cigarettes for pleasure instead of stress, write long letters in ink handwriting, and watch old movies in bed. And i'll paint my nails and my lips, and brush my ratty hair, and step out in skyscraper shoes to dance and lounge with my friends and friends i have yet to meet late into the morning.

Until then.

Today, a student of mine surprised me in my lab. She baked me vegan cookies.

One of Us Will Die Inside These Arms

weeping in a ballroom by cy

And I've Been Buying My Time On My Knees

i can't write worth shit. Fuck.

The City That You Know Don't Want You 'Round

It may seem that i have forgotten this little spot, but i have not.

i have just been a little lost. i have just been hiding in dark places. and i have been chain smoking. i have been perched, waiting for the world to pass its nights and days by me. i just stayed here. But i really want to go.

But there is no where to go here. It is a wasteland of story-high cranes and concrete skeletons amongst the knocked-down buildings and the giant holes that have replaced them. The crosswalks are closed everywhere and the city of a million persons is deserted. When the city remembers the wealth it has on the week's end, it drives itself downtown and drinks itself to death in the bars lit with large television screens.

"More than a million!," our baby-faced mayor and the developers chant. The inner city condos are selling as fast as the suburban thick-lawned, cookie-cut houses sprawled almost an hour away.

i run out to my old standbys to remember but leave early every time. i walk back to the little apartment and it isn't even midnight.

So i hide idle.

So Tired Of Playing With This Bow And Arrow

Most people turn introspective this time of year, reflecting upon all the tribulations they have overcome and the improvements that will follow. i, on the other hand, threw up in a champagne glass.

So this is the new year - the year anew.

When I Write It In The Sand, There Is Something Wrong

Would you love someone if they didn't love the same things as you, or be attractted to them if they did not like the same things as you? The affinity we have for others is really nothing more than an accumulation of things that we have collected - it's not you i like, it's the things you like that i like.

And it is how we define ourselves, with our things. i understand you don't define your self worth by a sport utility vehicle or perhaps a new condo's hardwood floors - i can tell this by your muted scoffing. But you, like i, quietly pride yourself on the books you have read, the magazines you hunt and restlessly await each month, the obscure music you love, the vinyl that you still buy, the clothes you wear that makes you stand out so, and the trips you might have taken around the world. Maybe our jobs and the education we have recieved along the way might creep into the mix of things. We are a collection of things, of objects, of spent money.

So if there is a pulsing want for another person, don't disguise it with justifications on why you would get along without the attraction alone. We really would be more sincere if we all just admitted that we just want to fuck.

Go Downtown With The Drugs In My Body

Without notice, i have slithered away into month-long disappearances. i now hide in an old downtown house with blown speakers and mixers, packs of cigarettes, warm coffee in the rain, raspberries and blackberries, dark chocolate, and my mess of papersreportsjournalsfigurestables next to my my little white laptop (i ask her to sing to me Feist’s The Reminder, Kitsunè Maison Compilation4, some BBC Radio’s Essential Mixes, and Billie Holiday). Those are the innocuous dohickeys in my toolkit by which i attack proposals, progress reports, final projects, posters, presentations, and committee meetings. Sometimes, when he isn't around, i dance barefoot on the squeaky hardwood floors to Dragonette's I Get Around or whatever Klaxons remix happens to popup that day. i smoke by the large window and watch the rain fall from the roof edges onto the green leaves of the bush and tall trees outside. Then, back to my patiently waiting white laptop.

i haven't been to my digs in months. i haven't been at home with my family either. i just travel from the university laboratories and libraries to this abode, then back again.

i miss you. and my friends. and my family. and the hipsters and the shows (the latter i only hear about after they have passed by). and the sun. and how we used to have coffee and pots of tea. and how i used to have the capacity to daydream.

---

i got in yesterday from LA. i am tired. i am old and boring. i just want to wake up stretching slow on a Sunday with the sunshine pouring in the window, with orange juice, some dub soothing from the stereo, and rolling around in the sheets. Instead, i fly again to Québec City this Saturday. Québec City for the Canadian Society of Microbiologists Annual Conference, LA was for an extended family wedding and marathon reunion/first meetings.

And LA is surreal. Four days of familyfamilyfamily matted into the hazy humidity, backed-up crisscrossing freeways, mega- strip- and mini-malls, palm trees, diamond-encrusted Sidekicks, and shopping carts rattling alongside Beamers and Benzes. Between the family picnic in the hills, soy beverages in Chinatown, and dinners in Orange County, i made an expensive quick last minute escape to West Hollywood on a Sunday night, to finally dance and drink and smoke and hug a broad-shouldered man as we both ran across the then deserted Wilshire Boulevard.


family touristing

flowershop love

wine rounds the tables and corsages on lapels




first meetings and late night Long Beach breakfast



family reunion bar-b-q house in the hills



late night sneak away



nobody innocuous



happiness is...

Streets of Neon French Romance Blinking Sweat

Sleeplessness for months ended the March, red-eyed to Montreal on Friday morning, still sleepless like the rest of the hedonistic weekend into this new month of April.

The Ed Banger Records Party over left me with bruises all over my body, my tights ripped, sweaty, dirty, drunk with wine and gin, and smoking packs of cigarettes in a most beautiful fox dress and blood red nails. Liquourbottlesmix of water passed groping hands in a grimy, sweaty, stylish, beautiful mad decent in the Banger pit, as we stormed the stage - "We Are Your Friends." Picture photographs taken by party people, my fox dress slipping and hair matted from the sweat of mine and others float about now, amongst the captured stage diving and kissing and sticky moist air. i slept in the dress beside warm bottles of Fresca and water.

i had packed Vladimir Nabakov's Laughter in the Dark and two packages of Benson and Hedges Special Lights, along with new sharp sharpies and every intention of reading, writing, and daydreaming the short escape away. Instead, sensual excesses coddled me with vegan feasts, cigarettes without disdain in bed and on long walks, sexy fucking results, boutique hats and plaid trench coats, endless coffee and earl grey tea; warm and lasting for hours, records and books, Just Noodles, and a playmate with freckles. A sword necklace now hangs around my neck, and i love licorice.

Red eyes to and from, Montreal's super sexy vibes.


a sign of mad ascension by cy




Busy P and Justice making Ed Rec by Reid




SebastiAn whispering Busy Justice by cy




dj Mehdi avant the jump via thecobrasnake.com




"we are your friends..." via thecobrasnake.com




"...you'll never be alone again" via friendattack.com




fucking fox grime via friendattack.com

Stochastic Reverse Engineering, Or The Sensing Of Stress

The month of February was a quick blink - a flutter of my thickly smudged and mascara-coated eyelashes in the large melty flakes of snow that made the University grounds look like a cold and absurdly utilitarian ski lodge complex. Also, i had lost two pairs of mittens this February month. i suppose it was really hard to smoke with clumsy mittens anyway. Goodbye to you then, Sir February, and our quick fling together; when you made the days piercingly cold to soothe my raging anticipation propelled by my seminar to my Faculty cluster, and when we danced all the gin-soaked night to a C'est Dangereux anti-Valentine's party, and when you spun me into a panic attack in a big bed at 4am one of your nights, so all i could do was cry out for someone to lie close to me.

March hides the spring and protects her from our city's eagerness (as the last snow is always during the May long weekend, preferably when our flimsy tents collapse from the snowfall accumulated overnight onto our ever-optimistic selves, every time we decide to inaugurate camping season). But today, i believed in the coming of spring, in a borrowed and worn-in badass tshirt and a black yarny sweater, as i walked along the melted streets in the sunshine with a large coffee and a soft package of cigarettes with an accomplice. i am still sick, and i know that no amount of orange juice or Neocitran could possibly make up for the way i have been careless with caring for myself. But i try in vain to suppress the chronically surfacing illness with vitamin C, throat drops, and a few less cigarettes. Spring comes with fever, right?

Which brings me to a colloquium a few days ago, held by the Physics department of the University i attend, hosted by a charmingly eloquent Dr. Stanislas Leibler, the head of the Laboratory for living matter at The Rockefeller University. i quite greedily drank in his nimble hour and forty minute talk on "Fluctuations, Informations and Survival: Lessons From Bacteria." He gets one thinking with his slides n' slides of formulas and clever collections of variables, about some sort of intertwined world where even stochastic variations can be accounted for in an elegant model. These stochastic effects of course, are multiplied together - not additive.

Multiplying the poor things i have decided for and done to myself is a limit fast approaching infinity at an exponential rate. i am quietly screaming all the way, like one might down a waterslide.

Kisses On My Arm When I Look Away, And That Tear Your Lips Becasue I Want It So Badly

January is always the most painful of months. There is no sense of renewal; just the expectation. We are left making the same mistakes, but far more indulgent and ridiculous. i hate January. And i am at ill ease becasue i have left many things to rot and oxidize in their hiding places, until they are poisonous through their pores.

Bows And A Blanket Of Weeds

i tilt my head, eyes wide and watering.

It is January again. The last bit of December was especially bleak, and a new year finds me lorn and all alone sitting on the steps of the science buildings as the sun sets, a package of cigarettes beside my black mittens. Many abstractions have left me for the coming of this year, and i have abandoned many of the fancies i had carved with care into wooden tables. Time will take it all and my head will fall between my knees.

Right now, i want kind pleasures like staying up late to the night by myself and daydreaming or reading thick Russian novels. i want to starve myself until all i can do is love so calmly and deliberately, to all those i know and have to meet.

Another one, yes?

With Wooden Buttons And An Apple Core

i dreamt i traveled and found you there,
in the woods one Christmas Eve,
waiting
by Hayato Nagao
...

Nights before Christmas found me coldly reconciled at a dance party soothed with whiskey, cigarettes, and beautiful young people. Then, waking up in a big old house to a blinking VCR clock telling me that i was to be in the lab in mere minutes, and i was in the same clothes as the night before. Blurry contacts and disoriented, i shake the boy on the couch next to me and we stumble out into the twilight to bundled-up schoolchildren crossing the street and on the playground in the winter morning, our breath frozen before us. i had parked my little red car in a school zone the night before.

Hurry along, all...

Garden Wall Of Eden, Full Of Spiderbites And All Your Lovers

There is not anytime to breathe when the semester's end sneaks up on me - i am so tired and rusty. But i let out my first sigh of breath along this stretch on a Friday, when the term paper left my hands for the professor's, and i decided for my sanity to consciously avoid any later indulgences in my studies for things eukaryotic.

i thought, on the dark and cold Friday night leaving the lab that i would congratulate myself with the best coffee in the little city with a stack of papers to mark by my side. Alone at last...not to last. Because Thursday and me and boy from a long time ago chanced upon each other and by Friday, we didn't mean to meet but did. He left the OR and found me in my snuggery, heavy with the smell of espresso. i took him to another, heavy with the smell of cigarettes and martinis, and by 4am, when the alcohol had cleared out of our systems, we said goodbye.

i woke to an empty house Saturday, but sleepy phonecalls catching back and forth from a lady i love woke me up at last - tea is what ladies have Saturday afternoons. And then they serve and have angry drinks with boys and friends when it gets darker in posh niches, and by midnight, they are hungry and drink Chinese beers in Chinatown and eat vegetarian noodles with burley men. By 2am, they drive to a hotel by the railroad tracks with a divebar for off-sales liquor and drink with the men back at the house until the morning.

Mourning Sunday morning because another boy in the house starts his cold lazy day off with waterfalls of pot, opening and closing the backdoor where i try to sleep - the fireplace is off in the morning. i rub my eyes and can taste the night before, but i ignore the blurry vision and hangover, and careful not to wake any other sleeping bodies, i take out the papers to mark until the house is bustling with hunger.

Vegan brunch to be had on a busy avenue, and i buy a small stack of cds that will dream me pretty dreams before we make it to the restaurant, and a pirate scarf after the pumpkin pesto tofu and yam hashbrowns. Somewhere in between, my cheeks blushing and anticipating, i saw the beautiful boy with whom i don't get to spend my Tuesdays or weekends with these days, to uncomfortable delight.

My weekplanner covered in cd stickers and i had agreed that i was not to see high jinx and hedonism until mid-December. But now, my brain works better after the coaxing from good and bad drinks, packs of cigarettes, and the wonderful people i get to be with. This week's end was a long and marvelous fuck up.

One More Tired Thing, The Grey Moon On The Rise

There is snow on the ground now. And there are less stubbed cigarettes littered around my white boots where i stand with my coffee, outside the grey university buildings. Strangely, the coldness of winter soon approaching has initiated a convulsive heat through my body and flickers of vitriolic discomfort rising in my rib cage and into my breaths. i am choler, in black mittens and a young girl's old dress-up jacket. i bite my lip hard, just like i can feel my hands crack to bleed into the dry air and the floating flurries.

...

i have been baking a lot. Baking is like doing an experiment in the lab, except more delicious. And usually, the results are tangibly better.

The Film Has A Story, But It’s Of Little Importance

These days are so different from the ones i used to have. i feel like there is no coherence and i just wander along, falling into one dysphoric situation and then on to the next - it's like some Lynchian feeling of awestruck confusion mixed with absurdity and ultimately, utmost fear. My old daydreams are now replaced by visions of myself violently crashing my scientific caravan into a hypothetical dusty and hostile territory. And i find myself often thinking about a robot-loving boy, and how his robots will stare blankly at me from his desk in the blue glow of the computer screen as i lie there.

There is something very unsettling lurking about. i am not sure what it is. But i have unlimited faith in a secret weapon to calm myself: a Norwegian duo strumming placid musical modulations over large headphones.

Free-Fucking Radicals

Back from Montreal with a newfound hatred for Air Canada. Fuck the national airline - it should have gone under years ago, and it seems to have no problem carrying that mentality as the insignia of the corporation.

*Punches the unused boarding pass*

But then i digress...

Montreal was a wonderful way to cap off the summer, with a multifunctional media pass used often to blow my mind to little melted bits, and a groovy/crazy magazine posse to cover an amazing festival named after how ridiculous Jacques Cartier must have looked to the Mohawks. On the second day of the fête, when Nick Diamonds mentioned that summer was indeed over, i felt very inclined to believe him. It was curiously astounding to fully realize the season had passed me by so quickly, a terrifyingly breakneck giant humming and spinning whirl since the rainy Norwegian spring. It did make me want to throw up a little.

Strangely, summer has never been an issue, although with such a short one where i live, i have always understood why the townsfolk worship and celebrate the two months with all glee and jubulance. However, this year is the first time i have felt any kin to the season. Maybe every summer for the last three years has presented itself to me without consequence because there was nothing to end it. The summer would turn into the fall slowly and the days would get shorter with the trees becoming yellow and red. Then there is the first cold that leaves frost on the windowpanes and then the snowstorms become more frequent. Warmer days then seem to creep through the darkness and you realize that the snow is turning to rain, and it's almost summer again.

This year, i am heading back to school, wet behind the ears. Hence my obsession with the ominous end of summer - an obsession leaving me with a weathered face, little sleep, charred brain and decreased liver function.

Indulge me.


a mind melting and Dinosaur Jr. in the wind by cy



in the Salon des Arts by jesse



dusk with James Chance & the Contortions by cy



how sad Clap Your Hands Say Yeah makes me... by cy




Sonic (fucking!) Youth by cy



waking up to interpretive dance and Islands by cy



up close and personal with Tokyo Police Club by jesse




Wolf Parade after soundcheck... by cy



sheet music standing by The Hidden Cameras by cy



beer o'clock at osheaga by cy



Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley makes my heart by cy



Kid Koala spinning for his mum by cy






The Flaming Lips and the massive explosions in the rain by cy



the posse by cy

It's The Ticking Of The Clock When You Wake Up Alone At 7am

Insomnia is my summer lover every night.

Quiet music floats from my stereo to hold my dreamy stream of consciousness, until i start dreaming to believe that i am in a haze of weary abstraction, folding onto the day's dreams, daydreams and preoccupations, and then i begin muttering nonsensical responses to the eventide. My eyes are closed, but i can see shadows dancing from my musings and from my candles on my dresser, so i curl up tighter. My dusty window lets in cool night time breezes as i am tossing and tangled in my little pink worn-thin blanket.

And then, the twilight is overtaken by violent punches of pink in the sky, making way for the dawn over the parade of cookie cutter houses along the horizon.

Fucking insomnia.

Wet Wet Wet

Tonight found me soaked and screaming while running to my little red car in the severe thumderstorms. Last night was dance floor sweat and spilled drinks in the electronic steam of the hifi.

So now, i have to do some laundry.

Wir Jagen der Monotonie

It feels like the days are stretching longer and longer. i am waiting for something to happen. It feels like i am just waiting for the days to end.

i busy myself with long nights on the rooftop patio of Broken City and in the bizzare amusement park that happens to be in town for a while with my media passes and magazine buttons. i daydream with Hayato in the afternoon at work and chain smoke with my editor all night until the wee hours of the morning to his favorite records. i watch Alicja and Anne splash around at the lake while i take pictures. i watch old movies with my boyfriend while we eat vegan Chinese takeout, and drag him down to hipster hangouts when i need to smoke. i am busy, but i always feel like i am waiting.

We are chasing monotony. With cigarettes and whiskey.

Honey Kisses Clouds Of Fluff

This beautiful long weekend of Canada Day saw none of me, as i was bedridden with a bad allergic reaction to a still yet to be known substance. Falling in and out of sleep for 3 days in the heat of the house lead me to the realization that summer is really almost over. So i dragged my sorry and swollen self out today, grabbed my dear friend and headed downtown to Prince's Island Park with slurpees in one hand and kites in the other, Wilco blasting out of the speakers of his old Ford Topaz.

We photoboothed, sucked down our "mix" slurpees, flew kites in the grass with no wind, laughed a lot, met up with friends for sushi and video games, and then had fries and brownies at the Denny's before we said goodbye at midnight.

Gosh Ryan, i am gonna miss you when you go.

Two Extra Weeks? Here and There? One Then Two?

enemies like this?

Amsterdam was rainy and soaked my clothes and journals with its endless downpours. i stood in the cold to try to get my clammy hands on tickets the night of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show, which was sold out months prior, joining the many other beautiful and polite locals with the same idea. No Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but something even better was the Radio4 show at the same venue, which is delightfully an old converted Dutch milk factory. Radio fucking 4. Fuck the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Anthony Roman: So the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are coming here in a few days.
Crowd: [cheers]
Anthony Roman: Did you guys know that they have four members now? They're touring with an extra guitarist.
Guy from crowd: [screams] Yeah! Four!
Anthony Roman: [speech about the Brooklyn scene and New York music]
Guy from crowd: [interrupting, screams] CGBG's!
Anthony Roman: Uh, are you just gonna scream out every New York landmark now?
Dave Milone: [screams] Yeah! Empire state building!

associé de crime?

Paris is supposed to be a romantic city, so on my third visit, i bring a companion. After a month of reclusive Norwegian bliss and talking to only myself, it felt vaguely unsettling to have a whole person with me on my junkets, or a human response to the mindless blatherings i would expulse. It felt slightly better after a week, and sharing my umbrella became a more romantic affair. The days passed with kissing, fighting, smoking, and wandering. Sustained on continual cups of coffee, we turn out to be the biggest goofs and watched The Da Vinci Code on the Champs Elysees late at night, then ran to the Louvre the next day. A few days later, we watched Marie Antoinette a few theaters down the avenue and caught the morning train to Versailles.