bone in sub

work today:

walking down yonge st., middle-aged guy in a business suit asks me “excuse me, where can i get a sweater like that? that looks great.” we had a conversation about aeropostale and i told him there’s one in the eaton centre. i think he was a straight guy with an interest in looking good.

in the store, i’m helping a woman in her late twenties with paint. she’s not uptight, we’re having a genial conversation, and after i help her find the paint she wants she asks me if i want to go to a party with her tonight. she “wasn’t my type” (not hot enough) so i declined nicely.

at the end of the day i’m helping get all the customers out and as i ring him through, an older man asks me “have you ever modeled?”. i immediately assumed he means architecturally or autoCAD so i ask “modeled what?”. “men’s clothing! you would do well. you should explore it.” he was really nice and not creepy, but i couldn’t tell if he was gay (gaydar says no, conversation says yes) or just speaking his mind.

i got some new clothes friday. i thought they fit me well, but SHEESH!

after riding to school on tuesday in post-freezing temperature, not only were my legs soaked, so was my bike. unfortunately, tuesday was a cold snap, so my entire bike (and the lock) were pretty seriously frozen. i had to use hot water to get it open again, but as i was riding down philosopher’s walk i decided to test the brakes – none of them worked. the back brake cable snapped right away. after some effort (and unsafe acceleration on the ice) my front brakes seized shut very quickly, throwing me off my bike. yikes!

my bike’s been locked up at school ever since. i’ve been a ‘plain old’ commuter ever since. i barely felt like a commuter when i rode everywhere since there were no crowds and it was really fast. i HATE taking the subway during the morning rush hour, the rest of the time i enjoy it.

i got home around 8 on wednesday, and proceeded to play online scrabble with some friends. we got into it, and i was yelling into voicechat when ‘my spot’ would get taken. shortly after 10pm my power went out. i actually entertained the notion that i was yelling so loudly about online scrabble that my landlady cut my power. little did i know that 25000 other people had outages. i went outside and saw that my whole street was off, so i gave up and consigned myself to an unproductive unentertaining night. i did clean my room pretty well (with a flashlight). my uncle called at around 8 letting me know his power’s out too, and that it seems like a pretty big outage (but downtown is still powered, so not 2003-level).

i went to bed assuming the power would be on after a couple hours, wearing only an extra sweatshirt as precaution. i woke up about 8 hours later, absolutely freezing, i mean shivering UNDER MY COVERS. i spent a couple minutes getting up the nerve to get out of bed, and unpacked a big duvet and added it to my bed. after that i slept nicely, but unfortunately it was so incredibly cold in my house i couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed until 4pm. that’s like a 17 hour sleep, but i guess the latter part of the “night” i didn’t sleep so well from the cold. went to school, played a concert, afterwards nobody wanted to do anything fun so i came home, expecting to spend the night at my uncle’s. my power was on, though, so i stayed here. the heat didn’t come on until way late! i think something is wrong with my landlady. she’s super nice, she just might have dementia.

orchestra is great this term. i’m playing timpani for debussy’s nuages, which is wicked, and some new composition. the new one, as i’ve written before, is more fun than i expected after looking at it, but there’s one section at the end that has about as much pedaling as rosenkavalier. the first time we ever ran it, though, i had practiced it well enough that i hit every note. i had the biggest smile on my face towards the end of it.

mouthwash and popcorn tastes exactly like……watermelon.

so many disasters today. after not sleeping (24 was too good) i tried to have a 30-minute nap at 6am before showering and heading to school early. i woke up at 6:30 slightly refreshed and with different priorities: more sleeping, less practicing. i set alarms on both my clock radio and phone for 8am. i woke up at 9:15 to a text message – SO LUCKY! i obviously slept straight through my cell phone’s funny alarm, but it appears my clock radio never went off. it was still set and primed for 8am when i woke up – i yelled at it (“HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!!!”) before i realized i wasn’t going to be late. i had time to quickly shower and shave and get to my 10am class on time (with no breakfast).

unfortunately it was ‘warm’ (1C) this morning, so the roads were covered in slush water, and my legs got soaked from feet to knees. my feet were wet all day until i got home a little while ago and took my socks off, gross.

school was fine, a cool class on mexican music and an interesting piece in orchestra. just from looking at it i thought it was going to be contemporary atonal nonsense, but it’s actually a pretty serious pastiche. not that cool to hear, but fun to play!

my bike lock was frozen, AGAIN. this time not because of freezing rain, but because of how wet it got on my ride to school this morning. ridiculous. i filled a coffee cup with hot water and melted it again, what a pain. unfortunately my back brake cable had failed on the way over, so i only had front brakes. on my way down philosopher’s walk, i tried to test the front brakes only to find that they were frozen solid. i tried to free them from the ice, and the brake cable snapped with the brake pads seized closed. wonderful. i think it was a combination of rust and today’s crazy melt/refreeze cycle. it’s -20 out right now.

somehow i don’t feel like it’s a bad day and i’m not angry. no idea why, but i’m still feeling good!

i’m watching the leaked screener of 24 season7 episode1 – script-wise it’s awesome, this one character is essentially making fun of jack bauer nondiagetically. fidelity-wise the screener is kind of bad (PROPERTY OF FOX), but there’s one sweet part – the pre-air music is essentially the theme from knight rider.

also, janis “Chloe II” gold is a ridiculous character.

i got my bike lock open by stealing someone’s water bottle, filling it with hot water, and pouring it over the keyhole cover. it was risky…if it didn’t work it would have been a much worse situation.

there’s this grumpy old guy that comes into my store to buy a very specific (but not very special) ballpoint pen, the Itoya Gripper MD. he usually refuses to talk to anyone but me (citing “she doesn’t know what she’s doing”), always asks “do you have any of those gripper pens.”, buys one or two, and leaves. i hadn’t seen him in 3 or 4 weeks, and this morning i had a funny feeling.

“i feel like gripper man is going to come in today,” i quipped to my colleague soon after i opened the store. i went and put a brand new gripper pen in my pocket, just in case. i had joked a couple months back about doing that.

towards the end of the day, i was switching out money at the front of the store when someone that i can’t see asks from behind me “do you have any of those gripper pens.” “yep!” i exclaimed as i whipped it out of my pocket. he was somewhat taken aback and asked me “……is this new?” before he bought it while humming happily. it may have been a coincidence, but he’s always been pretty cranky. i like to think that i made his day.

hockey is so much fun. especially because i’m just playing pickup games (“shinny”) and there’s no win/loss factor, it’s just making sweet saves and watching wicked plays. the assortment of people that show up is awesome, too – a decent dad and his kid that’s an incredible skater, an old scary-looking guy that’s actually really nice and has a great shot, a pudgy guy who has a 50mph wrist shot, just a crazy assortment. i just looked up slapshot speed records on wikipedia and it made me want to go play hockey RIGHT NOW

i enjoy how weekday mornings seem to get pretty good players. outdoor hockey is sweet in its own right, and it’s free at the dufferin grove rink. i’ve seen pickup games at mccormick, and it looked kind of lame…these guys were on average not lame at all.

the best part was that i got there at 9:30, played until noon, and walked home (a five minute walk!). took a shower, ate lunch, and biked to school for my 1:00 class…three hours of hockey before a day of school, that’s a perfect start. unfortunately when i got out of class at 6, my bike lock was frozen shut so i had to take the subway home. hopefully it will melt in the sun tomorrow afternoon.

going outside tonight after working out and seeing steam coming off of my body was AWESOME. maybe the coolest thing i’ve seen in a while!

i haven’t stayed up all night all week. this is excellent for me and kind of surprising! things are going great.

i had my two “joke” courses today. you could say i am taking them ironically, even though irony and hipsters are allegedly dead?

music recording: an hour of Telling Me Things I Already Know (to be fair it was the first class) followed by an hour of guided assignment time. the assignment was: given three recordings (takes), sheet music, and explicit instructions on which parts from each take to use, assemble them, save as an mp3, and email to professor by NEXT TUESDAY. i sent it BEFORE CLASS ENDED.

guitar: i thought i was going to learn some real technique and pretend i can’t play a bunch of chords. i still have to pretend i can’t play all the chords but it’s actually a really fun, relaxed class. i think i’ll learn a lot!

school might not be as bad as i thought . . .

this guy in my program that i talk to maybe once every two months updated his facebook status to say “is tired of all the blatant antisemitism. try living in Israel for a month and having your friend blown up on a bus, that will change your perspective.”

obviously he thinks the protests and commentary regarding all that israel-gaza stuff recently are antisemitism. not surprising that somebody somewhere would reach that conclusion, but someone in university? there’s no excuse for being that dumb.

i have a lot of acquaintances on facebook that post ridiculously stupid things which i ignore, but this one topped it so much that i had to reply :
“the discrimination is not against a religion and by definition is not antisemitism”

this made him so angry that over the course of 15 minutes the following happened:

1:

he deleted that and replaced it with:
2:

he then deleted that AND my original comment, replacing them with:
3:

4: he defriended me.

i love that it made him so angry he didn’t remove me from friends right away – he replied brusquely, then accusingly, then with open anger before he took The Final Measure.

edit for Good Times Googling: calvin marks toronto bass