with friends like you, who needs friends?

as you may know if you've talked to me at all lately, i am once again meeting my usual quota of crushes. it feels good to be out of the depths of asexuality again. i have had three real crushes in the last two weeks, and tons of other celebrity/historical crushes. unfortunately, none of them are turning out to be even remote possibilities. my latest crush is a boy who i work with at the school. he is dark haired and dreamy and really good with kids. my mom told me about a whole bunch of playground games i could play with kids, so i could trick him into thinking i actually like being around children.

i forgot to write about two things from my calgary trip:
1. i saw some big black squirrels. i didn't think that big black squirrels existed.
2. kelsey and i hung out with some turtles. we love turtles. a few years ago we were each going to buy a $600 red-footed tortoise for ourselves, and then we planned on kind of having shared custody over both of them. it never happened, which is probably a good thing, but we both still wish we had something shy and rock-hard to cuddle up to at night.

yesterday there was an explosion outside my window. the early afternoon had been REALLY mild, but around 3:30, a big wind picked up and it looked like it was going to rain. i was doing an assignment on my computer, and all of a sudden there was a huge bang and my lights and computer went off, and there was a big flash like lightning outside my window. i looked directly out my window at that exact second and saw a big fireworks-like explosion from a nearby power pole. exciting!!!

yesterday at rowing we derigged the boats and pulled the dock in. i left early for ballroom dancing. i love ballroom dance class so much because there are so many boys that i can pick a different one each time and pretend to be really focussed on what the instructors are saying, so i don't have to engage in too much small talk. i just "look left" and go into robot-mode. i love it. i finished my native studies article critique yesterday. what a relief.

too tired to smile today

on wednesday night i ended up going to the black dog on whyte to see illfit outfit play for CJSR's fundrive. i hung out with jessica, which was nice, because i'd really like to get to know her better. the set was okay, but the sound wasn't all that good and i was tired because they didn't get on until, like, 1 a.m. boo.

on thursday i went to all my classes, did some anthro homework, and went to my mixed media class at grant macewan. we worked on self-portraits in pastels. I've never really used pastels before, but I think I could grow to like them. I'm not sure how to describe how it turned out, but I liked it. it's really stencil-y, with obvious, blocked-in contours. i've done quite a bit of stencilling, but usually i just keep to one or two colors. i think that because of this class, i'll be more adventurous in doing multi-layer stencils.

on friday i worked at the legislature. i forgot to mention that last week's "work" consisted of a 2-hour group scavenger hunt around the ledge grounds. i seriously have the best jobs. this week i just opened the gift shop and tagged along with a school tour. afterwards i had three labs, and then i went to rowing practice. after rowing, I met my mom (who is staying at west ed. for teachers' convention or something) and my sisters at the mall, and we went out for supper and watched the movie "hairspray." i am embarrassed to say that i really liked the movie, mostly because all I ever want to do is go to dance parties, and i think i lived vicariously through all the characters in the movie. also, that particular movie was enjoyable simply because there are so few movies that i can actually see with my family, because we all have pretty different tastes. i also bought a brown coat from costa blanca, which has already made me a happy, happy girl.

on saturday i worked at the ledge for a couple of hours. i walked there, and on the way picked up a mix tape that i knew had been hidden in the area a couple of days ago. last week, a boy found one that i had hidden in august, and he replaced it with one that he'd made, which is the one i have now. i've only listened to the first side so far, but it's good. i don't think i'm going to keep it, though: i'll either give it a listen and then put it back in the same place for someone else to find, or i'll pass it on to a friend. i just feel like i need to start practicing letting things go, which is a lesson i've known about for a long time but have a difficult time actually doing.

after working at the ledge, i LRT'd to the downtown library, where i took out 17 cds that i had placed on hold. i put them all on my iTunes this weekend. exciting!!!

instead of studying all saturday night for my archaeology midterm, i took some time off to go see "the darjeeling limited" at the princess by myself. i sure do like going to movies by myself. apparently kelsey also went to see it in calgary the same night. bff! anyway, i didn't like it as much as other wes anderson stuff, but it was still pretty enjoyable. the crowd was a lot different than i expected it to be, though: it consisted mostly of middle-aged couples. since most of my good friends really love wes anderson movies, so i think i kind of expected more potential friends to be there. nope. i studied a little bit more when i got home, but maybe not as much as i should have.

On Sunday morning I slept in, did some studying, and then LRT'd to the Ledge. to work for the afternoon. There weren't a lot of visitors, so work was pretty slack. I feel like working at the Ledge. will be a good opportunity for me to have a bunch of new historical crushes. My number one historical Legislature crush so far is Sir Frederick Haultain, who was the first and only Premier of the NWT. He wanted the territories of Alberta and Saskatchewan to combine as one province, which he wanted to be called "Buffalo," and over which he wanted to become Premier. Neither happened, and now people say that his ghost haunts the third floor of the Legislature, coming out at about 7 p.m. and tilting all the portraits on that floor out of bitterness. I don't think I really believe in ghosts, but if I did, I would definitely have a crush on his. For the record, my other major historical crushes include John Milton, John Donne, Geoffrey Chaucer, and E.E. Cummings. Obviously my leanings are towards literary figures, thanks to my English degree, but I'm pretty sure that Alexander Rutherford, Ralph Steinhauer, Grant MacEwan, and others will soon join the ranks.

today i had my anthro 206 midterm, and i got back my 207 midterm. i got an 81% in 207, but the average was 80% and the class is graded on a curve, so i don't think that's very good news for me. boo.

i worked outside supervision at the elementary school today. the most entertaining part of the noon hour was talking with this grade 6 kid who had a weakerthans shirt on. i asked him if he had gone to their recent show, and to my surprise, he said yes. He proceeded to tell me, as he walked circles around me, avoiding eye contact, that he had actually interviewed them at the show. I immediately assumed that he was maybe writing for a school publication, so I asked him about it. Instead, he informed me that the interview was done for a newsletter he sends out to his family. adorable!!! apparently he asked them why they have so many songs about virtute the cat ("it's a metaphor"), and whether the song "tournament of hearts" is also a metaphor. i'm impressed that a kid that young even knows what a metaphor is. i hope that if i ever have kids, they make and send out family newsletters including rad interviews with hip bands. so awesome.

tonight i had rowing. we are going to victoria this weekend to row in two regattas. we leave at 4 a.m. on friday and come back at 11 p.m. on monday. i am already dreading the whole extroverted-athletes-in-hotels experience. you know how it is. you dread it too. just not as much as i do.

i need to work on an article critique for my native studies class. i am worried about it. ugh.

i got letters from jonathan and kelsey this week. jon's letter was rad and included a wicked bible tract, and kelsey's was an old magazine article on jason schwartzman/phantom planet. thanks, friends!

my lips not only mumble

today at work (supervising at the elementary school during noon hour), i overheard one of the grade 4 girls talking to her friends, who apparently have this "secret club" called "the webkinz" (kaylin told me about what "webkinz" actually are this afternoon, and if you go here, you can learn about them too: http://www.webkinz.com/). anyway, the kids (3 girls, one boy) were gathered at the tires, and the one girl said, "okay, guys, if i say, 'last one there is a rotten egg,' it doesn't ACTUALLY mean that you're a rotten egg. it just means that the webkinz are having a secret meeting, so you have to get there fast. but, like, if someone is always the one that is the last one there, we can call them 'turtle.' we can say things like, 'hey, turtle. just joking!' does anyone mind being called a turtle? because i don't, as long as you're just joking." hi-larious. i watched another little girl spend the ENTIRE noon hour on the swing by herself, and i think she was the happiest kid on the playground. at times, she was smiling really hard to herself. some other little girls came up to me to complain that she wasn't sharing the swing, but i was too enchanted by her to make her get off. i am realizing more and more that my approach to disciplining kids is maybe a little more laissez-faire than it should be. good thing i don't have kids.

i went to kaylin's after school for some tea and hang-out time. i cuddled with her cats and we talked a bit about art and world war III. she showed me some pictures of bats she drew in her journal. she is so neat. this is a poem by billy collins that has always made me think about kaylin:

Vade Mecum
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

i wish i could cut kaylin out of her life and paste her into a book that i could carry around. i wish kaylin would have a life filled abundantly with deep pocketfulls of sharp scissors, glue sticks, and books that are 1/3 lined, 1/3 graphed, and 1/3 blank.

i have a lot of homework and studying to do and i am not very good at getting it done. here is a fun new cree word for you to learn: cîscayisîpwâkanis. it is pronounced kind of like this: tsee-stsai-iss-eep-waag-an-is. it means "fork." another neat one is "amiskwacîwâskahikan," which literally translates as "beaver mountain house," but is the word for "edmonton." what an interesting fact!

i know you might roll your eyes at this

i was down in calgary this weekend with the rowing team for the Head of the Weasel regatta on the glenmore reservoir. on saturday (the day we rowed), we found out that the boat i was rowing in didn't win, but i think all the other u of a boats won in their categories. i was not really bummed at all. all i was really concerned about was how beautiful the day turned out to be, and how amazingly smooth the boat was. usually, we practice on old, stiff boats, but for regattas, we're allowed to use this awesome new eight. so nice.

BUT... yesterday we found out that we weren't actually registered in the right category. we had been racing against boats which were made up of four men and four women, instead of all women. if we had been registered in the right category, we would have won - we apparently beat the university of manitoba's crew by at least 5 minutes!

i didn't drive back to edmonton saturday night with the rest of the crew. instead, i stayed at kelsey's. we hung out on 17th ave. and watched TMNT II: the secret of the ooze and a couple of old, cartoon t.v. versions of the series. i was pretty exhausted, having woken up at 4 a.m. that day for the early-morning drive to calgary, so i went to bed pretty early. kelsey also told me this adorable story about how she met this boy on the c-train a few weeks ago, and he gave her a little drawing he made on a scrap piece of paper. she asked him why he had given it to her, and he said, "because you're aesthetically pleasing." cute!!! but then she had to get off the train, and they never exchanged numbers or anything. boo. i hope they see each other again. that's the kind of boy i would want my best friend dating/the kind of boy i would like to steal from my best friend.

on sunday kelsey and i hung out in downtown calgary for a bit. i got the new weakerthans and iron & wine albums, some sweaters from american apparel, and ghostworld on DVD (i have it on VHS, but i think it's time to convert). later in the afternoon, kate, one of the girls from the rowing team, and i drove back to edmonton. when i got home, dustan called and told me that he had gone to see a show last week, and the band played this one song that he has always thought of as "a song [dustan] wrote for [me] at some point in our friendship," but he's never told me about it. before he told me what it was, i guessed in my head that it was the weakerthans' "the reasons." then he played and sang the song for me over the phone, and it WAS that song! good guess, self! most of the time, dustan makes me totally crazy, but then he goes and does stuff like that and i remember why we're friends.

i wrote my anthro midterm yesterday. i had to skip work at the school to study for it. i'm not sure how i did on it.

last week i was talking to this girl in my cree class, and i realized that we had met, like, 10 or more years ago at a 4-H camp. crazy. it's even crazier that i remember that far back, because it's not like we had been good friends then or anything. anyway, i have cree class from 2:00 until 3:00 every day. i get so excited when we get homework. when i was little, i used to love those colored spelling books we had to do every year in elementary. i've always loved spelling and grammar in english, but i didn't think i'd love them so much in another language. good news, though: i do! today we got a whole sheet of english sentences that we had to translate into cree. translating from english to cree is way more difficult to do than the other way around. it's a good thing it's all so thrilling to me.

at rowing practice yesterday we unloaded the boats from the trailer and put all the rigging back on. afterwards we got to row in the good boat - the one we raced in calgary - and it was AMAZING. the other boats are so creaky and stiff and old, but this one is smooth and quiet. we realized this weekend that the boys are too big for that boat, so hopefully we girls will always be able to row it. it certainly makes practice infinitely more enjoyable.

last night i watched "hotel chevalier," the prologue for "the darjeeling limited," which is supposed to come out fairly soon if it hasn't already. i am so excited for it.

such an enormous thing, to walk and to listen

(i stole some of this entry from my native studies blog, so that's why there are some capitals. sorry if you read both blogs and this is mostly a repeat.)

last night i went with bri, bethany, and joel to see the weakerthans play at the myer horowitz. i'm not a huge fan of the band, but the show was pretty enjoyable. before the show, i hung out with kaylin at muddy waters on whyte. i showed her some of my quilt squares and encouraged her to submit some of her journal entries to "notebook". kaylin has this amazing collection of journals that she's kept for years, and collectively they are my all-time favorite piece of art. i haven't seen many of them, but the ones i have seen are great. i wished that she could go to the weakerthans instead of me, because she loves them, but she had too much work to do.

i had ballroom dancing class at dinwoodie again last night. I'm so surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. Usually I get really overwhelmed by having that many people in one place all at once. have i written about that blonde haired boy that is there, who i saw play in a band at one of jenni's shows a few weeks ago? i asked him to dance once. it was not too awkward. When I got back to my apartment after dance and the show, davina (the girl i worked with during the first summer i was on sucker creek) was waiting for someone in the lobby of my apartment. It was really strange to see her there, because even though we had lived with each other up north, she didn't know where I live in the city. also, she has been living in ottawa since that summer. hmm...

I think I did better on that one midterm than I thought I did. we got them back on tuesday, but they weren't completely marked yet. It looks like I might have gotten somewhere between 80-90%. that's a relief. I'm still not a fan of the trickery on it, though. also on tuesday I had lunch with alyssa at this amazing fresh pasta place in HUB, and I had rowing practice in the evening. I am so not ready for our regatta in calgary this weekend. I hate racing. I hate athletic competition. I just can't force my brain to care about it. but I do love being on the water, which is why I'm still rowing.

i had another midterm today. i am pretty sure i bombed it. it was so hard! it was for my northwest coast society class, but it mostly just had to do with memorizing language groups. boo.

old men sit and talk about the weather

last week becky came over after school one day to hang out and eat chips, because she was in my neighbourhood. nice. she talked a lot about her crush/new boyfriend. i like becky talking about crushes almost as much as i like having crushes. one thing i had forgotten about becky is that she loves the theme song from the 1988 winter olympics, and has had plans for years to have it played at her wedding. she is so interesting and funny and i am sad that she left for thailand/china/hawaii for two months yesterday. i am excited for when she gets back.

um... i had my first ballroom dancing class last wednesday, and it was a million times more enjoyable than i thought it was going to be. there were about 200 people there, which made me feel way less nervous (i had thought there were only going to be 20-30 of us, and that my every wrong move would be under close scrutiny). also, i was really entertained because there was this indie rocker boy with long blonde hair who i recognized because he played a show with jenni's band a few weeks ago. what!? those kind of boys don't come to ballroom dancing classes! at least not without some hot trendy girlfriend! but he was there by himself. adorable. i hope he becomes a really good dancer and sweeps girls off their feet.

on thursday i had my second art class. ugh. we continued sketching portraits in charcoal, but this time they were self portraits. i got there a little late, so i had to use a desk lamp that had no base. i had to hold it in place by setting it on a little bench and then holding it in place by piling my cowichan and sweaters on top of it. therefore, the light illuminating my face (we were using mirrors to see ourselves) was coming from below me. ugh. when we were done, we put our drawings up on the wall so we could critique each other's. mine didn't look SO bad up close, but when it was posted up, it looked like i was a little mexican man with a moustache. boo. i will make sure to get better lighting next time. after art class, jenni and i tried to go for our formerly ritual thursday night wings at the funky buddha on whyte. to our dismay, we got there at 9:58 and discovered the kitchen closed at 10. boo. so, we tried to go to the hudson's under my apartment, but found a huge line of rowdy undergrads, so we decided to order pizza at my house. brad, emily, alyssa, and jenni's band-mate doug joined us. we hung out and watched arrested development and doug told us about how he thinks that aliens are just people from the future who are visiting us now, and he also drew us some replicas of the drawings he used to do in grade 8 - drawings of fuzzy, smiley aliens in bands. funny.

on friday i worked at the legislature from 8:15-11:15; had class from 12-3; had rowing from 5:15-7; and then drove back to vermilion. i taught my dad how to post pictures on facebook - he had gotten a facebook account when i was in guyana so he could see all my pictures from there, and now he wants to post his own pictures of his horses and his yard. funny. also, he edited his profile, and in the "about me" section, he wrote, "I'm o.k." that's really, really funny to me for some reason.

on saturday morning my parents left vermilion to drive to calgary via edmonton for my cousin nick's wedding. i, on the other hand, stayed in vermilion to get ready for joel and esther's wedding. dustan and i had planned to go to the wedding together, so he picked me up at the mall and we went to the church. the wedding was really, really nice, and joel and esther are pretty adorable. after the ceremony britt and jeremy and nicole and dustan and some prairie peeps and i went to sammy's for ice cream/screamers. our screamers made dustan and me shiver, so we went to a & w for a bag full of baby burgers. then dustan and i hung out at my house for a bit, and then he left for family pictures and i drove to clandonald for the wedding reception/dance. i sat with becky and sarah and justina and some other peeps for the dinner. as soon as the dinner was finished, becky and i worked really hard to stack up the chairs and tables and to sweep the dance floor while everyone else stood around.

after i danced to about 5 songs (during which, at one point, joel came up to me and said, "is this an A-lister dance party or what!?" you said it, joel! actually, I said it), i went to my car to change into jeans and flat shoes and a t-shirt. when i came back, there wasn't a good song on, so i had two bites of a brownie and some pieces of fruit and some water. then my face starting itching. then my neck started itching. then my palms started itching, and i knew something was wrong. i went to the bathroom and saw that my face was all red and swelling, especially on my eyelids and chin. ew! so i hid in a stall with a piece of damp paper towel, trying to get the swelling down. i just got sicker and sicker, and ended up puking - my first time in 12 years - that's officially half of my life! my tongue even swelled up, which i hadn't noticed until nicole came into the bathroom and recognized my shoes and i tried to tell her, "i'm really sick - can you go get my sweater and camera and car keys and maybe some help?" nicole's mom drove me back to vermilion in my car, and we stopped at the hospital so i could get some benadryl and something for nausea. the whole episode was so tragic that it was, and continues to be, hilarious to me. i had been so excited about this dance party for the last 7 months, hyping it as "the best dance party of my life." ha. the only thing that kind of sucks is that i now have this new, extreme food allergy, but no one knows what exactly it is that i'm allergic to. yikes! if i go on dates from now on i will have to stick to white bread and water so that my face and tongue don't swell up in front of cute boys.