bone in sub

what is up with chinese young women liking winnie the pooh? and singaporean girls of the same age liking tweety bird? i’m talking about the 18-22 age group. this is a solid trend i’ve noticed, not just coincidences. last summer part of one of my summer jobs was adding thousands of people as myspace friends for a few ‘profiles’, and it seems like if you’re a chinese or singaporean female between 18 and 22, there’s a very strong probability you have winnie the pooh or tweety bird (respectively) pictures all over your myspace, and potentially own clothing or other real-life objects with these things on them that you display in your profile picture.

it disgusts me – not only are these things really meant only for small children, they’re horribly saccharine. it goes further than just a myspace correllation – one of my roommates has winnie the pooh dishes, shoes, and probably more. she’s 23. a girl at my school has a tweety bird jacket that she wears regularly. neither of these people are intelligent or assertive enough to be wearing these things ‘ironically’. THEN WHY?

GROSS!!!

i finally got my ontario driver’s license! my 2 years 9 months of driving ‘illegally’ (even though my american license was valid) are over, and i can stop bringing my passport to bars. i still don’t understand why you only have 60 days to use a foreign license after you move here.

it’s maybe the first ID picture i actually look good in. the rest of them don’t really do me justice. i had a silly laminated ID card for orientation week in my first year of university that i looked really good in, but that doesn’t count.

the new ontario licenses are awesome. the picture’s in black and white, and like the health card there’s another little picture on it, but on this it’s old-fashioned hologram style with the zig-zag plastic that makes a horrible noise when you scratch it. also like the health card it has that stupid trillium flower all over it, but whatever.

two nights in a row (sunday and tonight) i’ve tried to go see the new batman movie, and it’s been sold out – weeks after it came out. i guess this is what happens when you live in a huge city.

i spent $150 on food in one day last week – groceries at a big 24-hour place, a small local place, a fruit market in my neighborhood, and m&m meat. a lot of it’s still left because no matter how much i love to eat, i can’t eat that much food in one week, but it has been a bonanza. i never really ate poorly before, but a ton of fruit and some really nice meat-centred meals as well as multiple-course meals have been wonderful. i haven’t gained any weight (thanks to my great genes), but i have felt unusually healthy! i’ve also been sleeping very well, maybe my prior sleep troubles were diet related.

saturday was a weird day at work (my weekend retail job) in that nothing weird happened – no idiots or jerks making a scene over the entire day. those kind of folks make the day interesting, but it’s still nice to have only agreeable people.

sunday was back to normal, though. an angry lesbian was buying some stuff with her girlfriend, and while her (nice, well-adjusted) girlfriend shopped, she freaked out because we were “still using those [plastic] bags!!!”. a couple minutes later, she called us from STILL INSIDE THE STORE to complain. then she asked for her things double bagged!

there’s a grumpy old guy who comes in almost every weekend to buy a certain type of pen. once or twice, a long time ago, a coworker accidentally told him we were out of them when we weren’t. since then, he has refused to deal with ANY of my coworkers and will only talk to me. it gets really funny/mean when i’m busy (doing my job) and i can’t talk to him. he’ll ignore anyone else who’s available to help him, interrupt whoever i’m talking to talking over them annoyingly, until i tell him i’m busy and that other person is free to help him. yesterday this happened as usual, but got even more ridiculous: my coworker took him to exactly where the pens are – we had a ton of them – but halfway there, he turns back to me and interrupts AGAIN with “excuse me! he doesn’t know where they are, can you come show me?” i look at the guy who was helping him, he’s standing there holding up one in each hand hilariously waving them. i am unnaturally entertained by this kind of thing.

this is the best cereal in the world, and the first time i bought it i ended up eating the whole box in one sitting:

last month, i finally exchanged my virginia driver’s license for an ontario one. because of the horrible ambiguity of the MTO website, i assumed i had to go to an actual drivetest centre, so i went to the closest one – at the end of the subway, plus a bus ride. whatever, one trip, why not. it ended up being kind of arduous, it’s hard to find stuff “out in the country” when you’re not driving, plus it was a hot day. oh well.

yesterday i got a letter in the mail saying there was a “problem with the signature or photo on your new license”, so i have to go back. i wanted to make absolutely sure i had to go all that way again, so i read the MTO site a little more this morning…turns out i don’t have to go to an actual “DriveTest centre”, just a “Private Driver and Vehicle Licence Issuing Office”, and there’s one a five minute walk from my house! could have just gone to that one in the first place! whoops! i thought it was weird that the DMV would be way out at the edge of the city. i’m curious what was wrong with my application, but i have a suspicion that it’s because the pen at the ‘DriveTest centre” that i used to sign it was out of ink.

i had been thinking how cool it is that i can think of any album, and have really visceral, almost synaesthetic memories of when i was first into it, and any times in my life i was really listening to it. so imagine my pleasure when i found this site, that turns your last.fm info into a timeline poster of your listening. i’ve only been logging to my last.fm since late january, so it doesn’t go back super far, but still far enough to let me just stare at it and time travel.

click for big

this might be mildly interesting if you know me, but for me it’s fascinating. i can see a ton of things from it:

• the week or two after i dumped a girl i had been dating for years, i listened to a lot of reel big fish. i think most of their songs are about dumping chicks
• one reel big fish song, “she has a girlfriend now”, has a female guest singer. i liked her voice so i checked out her main band, save ferris (it’s horrible).
• i also spent a lot of time at home, on the computer, listening to music for a while here, until something happened a week into february and this changed.
• right after that when i was really excited/into ‘other girls’ for a few weeks, i listened to a ton of New Pornographers. i don’t know why but those two subsets of memories are really associated.
• even though the zombies only have two songs i like (‘care of cell 44′, and ‘this will be our year’), they were noticeable during all that.
• as a followup to the new pornographers, i checked out destroyer, dan bejar’s band.
• i didn’t notice this at all at the time, but the week or two before my recital (the most stressful time of the year) i listened to mainly punk. nofx and fugazi.
• after my recital, i switched from punk to 70s rock: led zeppelin, the kinks, and black sabbath.
• my three favorite bands, led zeppelin, david bowie, and the beatles, are always present, and their popularity fluctuates in periods of weeks, not days.
• i listened to fischerspooner for the first time in early april, and i liked it so it stayed around for a month.
• fischerspooner rekindled my interest in electronica, and following that i listened to the chemical brothers, daft punk, and dj shadow.
• mid-may i had a gig playing some soundtrack music of my uncle’s with him, so i was listening to it to learn it for a few days before the show
• right after that, i got the flight of the conchords album.
• if i’m listening to tenacious dundee, why not listen to tenacious D?
• late may through mid-june i didn’t sleep very much.  staying awake all night a couple times a week and not sleeping much the rest – late at night i would either go for a walk, ride my bike, or be on the computer listening to music, and it’s noticeable.  the big gap is when i was out of town for a bit.
• i started listening to fabriclive, which has a ton of different artists, so there is a lot of variety here.  after i listened to dj yoda’s fabriclive, i revisited his discography because i like him so much.
• in the last couple weeks i’ve been huge into david bowie.  like, so much.

my subconscious is really strong. in addition to all the really strongly rooted habits and things, i’ve been doing weird stuff in my sleep. last night i woke up at 1am, right after a dream, with an incredibly strong urge to record it in my dream journal. i did and went right back to bed feeling very satisfied.

this morning i woke up, got out of bed to put some music on, and there was a text file open with 8 album titles in it. i guess in my sleep i climbed out of my loft bed, got on the computer, opened notepad and started making a top ten (or more) favorite albums. it was a pretty good list….but it was made up entirely of zeppelin and bowie.

this news article is horrible and ridiculous. “someone who USED to live in toronto just got killed in a third world country.” wow! doesn’t matter!