Congrats on romance and everything Gabi/Kevin/Anyone else who is feeling particularly romantic?


Today, me and Kevin saw Regina Spektor.

She's not much of a talker in real life. I was surprised. I was sort of looking forward to the witty stage banter and all that. She played some old songs though, so it was all A-okay.

That's the end of my fun stuff this week. Now, all I've got is work, which is fine. Work keeps me busy, which keeps me from getting depressed I guess.

I've been posting more pictures than words these days. I haven't got a whole lot of personality right now, so that's my excuse.

I slept about 4 hours yesterday.

The result: I am getting Cortisol tummy, and I know exactly why it's happening. When someone like me doesn't get enough sleep, their body goes into slow-stress mode, and their adrenal glands release adrenocorticoids (ie cortisol). In their maligned attempt to combat my stress, cortisol basically travels to my stomach area and gets all of my body cells to release their blood sugar...

which does nothing and then gets converted into fat. Just in the stomach though.


It is hot as hades here. My mom is visiting with a lot of adults, and I am sitting pretty. My goal today is to completely exhaust myself and not take any naps so that I can get back into something which resembles a regular sleep schedule. Other than that, I am planning on applying for some more jobs, and working hard on mom's birthday present.

I am such a mean, horrible son sometimes. I hope I make my mom enough money in the future to compensate for it all.

My workweek is finally over. I am exhausted and angry at everything.
At the mere mention of someone else doing anything remotely not miserable, I am known to quip "Well they obviously didn't work 24 hours over 3 days..."
Being an adult is going to destroy me. I just know it.

Speaking of nefarious future developments, I had a dream last night that I failed economics. In this dream, my professor had the entire class start a week early by distributing some 'thinking questions' about the current economic climate for us to submit answers to before school began. I only answered two of the fifteen questions, and my answers were poorly edited and simplistic. I was ashamed of myself. When the professor handed out marks for the assignment I was expecting something pretty good, and instead I got a 15%.

The only conclusion I can draw is that I am completely neurotic, both consciously and subconsciously.

Here is how my final week is gonna go:
Monday: Finish the drawing of my mother, Set up the phone in Vancouver, Donate my Clothes, Sell more books, Spend most of the day at outlink, Discover how to use my credit card, Write goodbye letters.
Tuesday:Bring in stuff for teachers, Spend the day with Brent, Use Sarah's external hard drive to transfer music to his computer, Possibly mail stuff off to Sarah.
Wednesday: Haircut in the morning, Buy a new shaver cord, Buy an umbrella, Buy a rain jacket, Completely vacate my room as much as possible, and start getting my crap packed up into boxes
Thursday: More packing, Work from 5:30-10:00
Friday: Work from 10:00-4:30, Sushi date with Gabi, Fun bicycle event in the evening
Saturday: Work from 11:30-6:00, Pack mom's car with my stuff, Get to bed early
Sunday: I disappear

This is my second party in two days.

I am eating like a normal teenaged boy, except sans meat.

Yesterday:

Woke up, ate enough food to count as breakfast and lunch combined, biked to work. Worked for 8.5 hours. Biked home, went to the washroom, changed, went to Kelly's surprise party.

Party food of choice: Shish Kabaabs, Baked Alaska, Marsh-mallows

Today:

Woke up, ate enough food to count as breakfast and lunch combined, biked to work. Worked for 8.5 hours. Biked home, went to the washroom, changed, went to Gabi's goodbye party.

Party food of choice: Salmon, Veggie Burgers, Noodles, Cheesecake



There is a reason this blog is called looplife.

There are not enough hours in the day for all of things I want to do.


Only 17 more hours of work this weekend =D

In Japanese cuisine, ikizukuri or ikezukuri (生き作り/活け造, “prepared alive”) is the preparation of sashimi from a living animal.
Ikizukuri usually begins with the customer selecting, from a tank in the restaurant, the animal (shrimp, octopus, lobster, assorted fish) they wish to eat. The chef, who is most of the time a sashimi chef takes the animal out of the tank and filets and guts it, but without killing the animal, which is served on a plate, sliced, with the heart still beating.
Ikizukuri of fish consists of thin, sheet-like slices or finger-sized pieces sometimes garnished with lemon wedges, a decoration of ginger, or nori (seaweed). Squid and small octopus are usually wrapped around a chopstick and eaten whole.
Ikizukuri is a controversial method of food preparation, both in Japan and in other countries.

Sometimes, I think piscetarianism is cheating. Moralistically, and ecologically, it's not any better than eating red meat or poultry.
If anything, the fact that I still eat fish is more a throwback to my Jewish upbringing in which fish was considered 'parve' and therefore something I could order at restaurants.

But I love eating fish, so its a moot point.
I work at 7:45 tomorrow. I should have been in bed a while ago.

I spent most of today in a sort of coma-state, due to the fact that I was immensely tired from the casino, yet still pretty caffeinated from the diet pepsi I consumed the night before. It's a strange, unhealthy mixture of wakefulness and body aches (plus I stank to blazes from sublimating all that crap throughout the day).

The point of today is that I am an unsentimental, heartless dog hell-bent on stamping out my inner child.

I completely emptied my bookshelves today.


For the last fifteen years, this corner of my room was filled to the brim with lively children's' books, fantasy stories, holocaust stories, etc.

Now it is empty. My parents are keeping some of the children's books so they can reminisce about when I was smallish. As for the rest of them, they have been packed away into large cardboard boxes. We are taking them slowly to different used books stores across the city to receive money in return for them.

So far, we have reduced our load from 3 boxes to only 2 boxes. I am $92 richer.

It feels like I am selling my childhood, but I don't feel guilty or even melancholy in the least.

On the contrary, I'm pretty happy to have all of this extra space in my room, plus the extra cash is equally excellent.

I talked to Sarah via telephone, set my dad up with his livejournal, worked at co-op, and did not do much else. I lead a very boring existence, really.

The Weekend:

16 Hours of Hard Labor, Getting Lost on Bicycles, Downtown, Late Night Chinese Food, Brent Thiessen, Movies On My Laptop, and My Room The Disaster Zone.

My mother and I are better. We saw Meryl Streep and Amy Adams prepare food last night.


Cute movie.

I work today, I think. I'm also seeing Dr. Derm for the last time. There are going to be a lot of 'lasts' this month.

Me and mom have reconciled.

I am in the middle of putting together my work-study application, and am also in the middle of combing through all of the crap in my room.

8.5 hours tomorrow.
8.5 hours Sunday.

This is retribution for my vacation, but to be honest, I could use the money.

Right now, I am exhausted. Sleep in half an hour, methinks

Early Morning News and Cereal

Then 8.5 hours of you-know-what, but today, mysteriously propelled by the marvelous forces of Calgary Co-op's coke knock-off.

The side effects of me having too much caffeine:
-I have to pee a lot (what else is new?)
-HAPPY
-Kind and courteous to customers
-The time flies by

The point of this revelation is that I am a much better employee while on stimulants. I think many food-service work industries could capitalize on this ingenious finding by giving their wage slaves pre-shift Dexedrine. Just imagine the sudden spike in quality service and employee satisfaction.

Tonight was more eventful.

We visited Sarah, and sorted hemp beads (and talked with Emmjay for a bit too)
Me and my mother saw a movie

Factory farms are the things that heavy metal music videos are in more need of.

And then we go get Gelato. Mine is cinnamon flavored


Speaking of places I sourced that image from, I have discovered a restaurant review blog that basically makes my life. If anyone here likes food porn half as much as real porn (they run about neck-in-neck in my world), give this a visit: http://foodosophy.wordpress.com/

Finally, I download this for free from the Azeda Booth website.


And you can too: http://www.azedabooth.com/ep/
Do it! Azeda Booth is rockin.

Dear Diary:

Instead of being a normal, social-minded 18 year old boy and spending my time getting drunk and 'chilling' with my friends, I have spent most of this week reading from my vast collection of tranny-zines and cooking up a storm in my mother's kitchen.

Does that mean there's something wrong with me?

I am, by the way, not going to eat at Boston Pizza ever again, because they served me a shitty dinner today. When I order pasta with tomato sauce, I expect a bit of pasta with a nice amount of tomato sauce, not an entire box's worth of pasta unlovingly garnished with one measly diced tomato. Who would pay $11 for that kind of shit!?

I was going to be angry...

But instead, I just shoveled it down, worked for 4.5 hours, and then miraculously felt better. It won't work like that tomorrow; day shifts always ruin me, but for some unknown reason, I love the late shift.

Sarah is back in the Hospital. They are storing her at the children's before they can receive her at foothills this weekend. This will be her first ever voluntary admission, which is positive.

Everyone in the family is friends again, but things are going to get tight after tomorrow, because my dad is leaving for Toronto. On the bright side, my aunt is sacrificing vay-cay time to return to Calgary and help my mom out (because if mom takes any more time off of work, the corporate part of her soul will initiate less-than-peaceful protests).

I think it's been Friday since I last blogged. So like what are my hopes and dreams? Let's work backwards.

Today:
I work from 4:15 until 10:15. I do this so that my polite, manly co-worker Justin can go to the Stampede and watch Taylor Swift (T. Swift, as he calls her) sing about boyfriends, love, etc. I do this because $60 has never sounded nicer.

Edna reveals that she has two mentally disabled children. I ask her what they have, and she explains that no one is really sure. Just that one of them is twenty-something, and deaf dumb and blind. Kind of like the Cocteau Twins song, but with diapers. Every day, I am discovering that seemingly normal people all have different battles they fight and crutches they lean on. From no-one-in-particular's point of view, the whole thing probably looks pretty funny.

After work, I broke a ceramic mug.

Before all of that, I biked from my mom's house to my dad's house and got pissed on by mother nature.
Something similar has happened every day this week. Don't believe a thing about the supposed drought we're experiencing. It is a lie.

This morning, I made bread from scratch at my mom's house.

It is Ciabatta bread, and the small portion I had was quite tasty.

-----------

Yesterday:

I enjoy a relaxing bout of Driver's education in the evening. I literally sleep through most of it, missing the life-saving public service announcements courtesy of Australia. This can end only in my death by drunken, sleep-deprived, distracted car-crash.

Me and my mom get into a fight in the morning, but talk it out after driver classes.

Graham and I go on adventures, including:
-Vietnamese Food
-Searching Through Recordland (DON'T GO! Most disorganized, user-unfriendly record store I have ever been in. Claustrophobics beware)
I get:



Graham gets the first Prozac album.
-Jumping on Graham's trampoline (Graham can do fancy tricks, while I am very good at hurting myself).
-Bikes
-Talking

We used my newly acquired bike map to find Inglewood. It was the map's christening.

-------
Have you noticed how bad my tenses are throughout this post?
-------
Monday:
Dentist in the Morning
Denny's at Midnight

And in the middle, I am sitting in my Kitchen covering a box with tin foil while listening to CJSW. The box is going to become the official thought-box of the North American thought bank's Calgary branch. I am going to go downtown sometime later this month and PAY people to THINK. Ingenious, no?

I phone in to the radio station requesting that they play 'I'm not done' by Fever Ray, and they play it. I feel like a million bucks.

Gabi takes me to see simple plan. It costs me $0

Dear Gabi: I am not an enormous fan of simple plan, and would probably not have seen them twice if it were not for you. It should bother me that I have seen them more often than I see bands I actually listen to, but it doesn't. It's always a good time- I especially enjoyed watching the kids fight each other this year.
----------
The Weekend:
I drown my identity diffusion in good'ol-fashioned labor, and IT WORKS. Go figure...

I've gotten a surprising amount of my summer to-do-list accomplished, so I'm going to add some more things to it, just for variety's sake.

-Visit Chinatown and see those enormous carps they keep in the stores
-Do Stampede
-Scope out garage sales
-Write my goodbye letters to my important people
-Make goodbye mixes
-Get fab abs
-Take a bicycle repair course
-Have a day where I pretend to be sick, and sit around in bed watching movies and playing gameboy all day
-Use my newly acquired Calgary bike map to navigate this large and dangerous city
-Get my hair cut
-Apply for work-study work on campus
-Hayao Miyazaki film festival with the help of BLOCKBUSTERS
-Eat the rest of my Snyder of Hanover pretzels (tonight?)
-Discover what is wrong with my excretory system
-Become re-stoked for University
-Finally get a cell phone
-Get a credit card
-Finish off the vodka which is sitting in my closet
-Draw more things with teeth
-Finish reading all of the zines I am borrowing
-Remember my dreams
-Get over it

Tomorrow, I will work for 8.5 hours.
I can already feel my genuine love for humankind slipping away.
I feel like I recently had all of these projects and things to look forward to, and now they have suddenly disappeared, leaving me confused and unoccupied. Unoccupied, but still busy.

Michael Jackson wasn't Jesus. 20 pages of coverage in the Calgary Sun is freaky, and uncalled for.

I was microdepressed at work. It was like being caught in a bubble where time went very slowly, and I had no energy and life seemed very lifeless.
Except I had to keep smiling and tolerating everybody the entire time.
I started lying about my age and which grade I'm finishing, because it makes people stop talking.

Eg:

"What grade are you finishing?"

"Grade 12."

"Wow, what are you going to do next year."

"I'm going to school."

"Where?"

"In BC."

"What are you going to take?"

"Psychology."

"Wow, I had a friend who went into psychology, and then committed suicide years later. Is that funny or what?"

"Hilarious."

Versus:

"What grade are you finishing?"

"Grade 11."

"Oh."

I've started telling people that I'm 16 if they ask, because no one believes me when I say I'm 18, and then they feel that it's a very good idea to remind me that I don't look my age, and then discuss how I look like a kid with their elderly significant other.

The worst was this guy who started telling me about his first job, and how it involved harsh manual labor, and only paid 33 cents an hour. I think he started overplaying it because it made him seem more masculine.

My co-workers are dumber when I work day shifts to boot.

Enough complaining. Solstice music festival was a blast, and I'd better get to sleep so I can enjoy it tomorrow as well!

Today was awful. I was rained upon, harshly, whilst wearing jeans and a tee-shirt... I complained and complained, and bitched and complained some more before it hit me that rainy weather is going to be something I'll have to deal with a LOT next year.

I need GUMBOOTS
and a BIG UMBRELLA
and pants that don't stick to me uncomfortably whilst wet
and a BIG PONCHO

and LOVE

after my shitty rain-upon, I went to work, which was awful, because all of the lazy people (like Dave, who spends his entire shift smoking up in the back somewhere [He is around 50 years old]) were working slacking off tonight. Solution: I do everything.

I will not miss the "I do everything" part of my job.
I am looking forward to the possibility of a career where some of my coworkers come from the part of the gene pool that god DIDN'T piss in.

Eventually, all of the work got done, and me and Blaire got to talking.

Me: "I need LOVE, Blaire."

Blaire: "Wait. What kind of love are we talking about here."

Me: "Um... at this point, I'll take whatever I can get."

Blaire: "Me too. We're so pathetic."

Me: "Like... you've seen dying Patrick Swayze, right?"

Blaire: "Yah?"

Me: "Definately acceptable at this point..."

Carrie is going to solve my love problems. She will find me a Native Girl to marry, and then I will go on welfare FOREVER. I told her that looks are not important, as long as the one she finds for me is native, and marryable. We're going to print out pictures of me, and then put my zodiac info or something on the back, then hand them out.

I swear I used to have a life. No wait, I didn't.

I have wet socks.

I am working all weekend, but after that, I get to enjoy the last week of school.

It is just me, dad, and Rebeccah this weekend. We have SO MUCH FOOD.

I want to write some short stories for English.
But I don't know if I'll have the time. I'm pretty bad like that...

We went out for breakfast and dinner for dad's birthday. Breakfast was awful. Peach melba crepes should NEVER be cold in the middle. I'm not going to phil's again if I can avoid it.

No more co-op for me this weekend. 19 hours in a weekend is plenty, thankyou.

I made cinnamon buns last night for no reason.
The secret ingredient: 2 different varieties of butter. And a lot of it.

My blogging just get worse and worse. I am such a baconcunt.

I was ready to kill something today.
I worked 6.5 hours
and the sunscreen got in my eye.
and the customers were being demanding.

So I went home and yelled at my folks, then apologized. They understood.
I wish school could just be done with. Screw grad.

I was going to get SO MUCH MORE accomplished this week.

We are writing a practice free response question with patterson on the same day that he's coming over here for passover, so that will be awkward. I'm looking forward to making food, though. I am on dessert duty, so I'm going to make sorbet using ice and a food processor.