28.11.05
    I was cut off mid-rant earlier, so I’m posting it in its entirety here. There is no escape. Here follows the plot of the majority of most big-network medical drama shows today. More or less:

    Close-up on the crying face of a grimy, yet adorable child in slightly tattered clothes as she cradles a dead puppy in her lap, sitting in a hospital waiting room because moments before, she and her mother were found by a good-looking doctor with a tragic history in a nearby alley, her mother with a needle sticking out of her arm, unconscious and hypothermic in the gathering apocalyptic snowstorm, whereupon she was rushed into the hospital with a tight camera shot on the gurney wheels slipping on the ice, and now the girl is sitting alone, but next to a bag which happens to contain a bomb, but no one knows it because the bomb threat was called into the pay phone in the waiting room where it was answered by a somewhat sinister homeless man who just came in to get away from the cold and who happens to be mute and illiterate, and who was put into restraints after approaching the child (and bag) in an "agressive" manner, and he can only communicate in his unique mode of sign language which is only understood by the woman who was found unconscious in the alley, where they used to meet regularly, who can only be saved by the good-looking doctor with a tragic history who can’t perform the vital operation until he rips off his shirt and throws a few things around in a symbolic gesture of his unresolved sexual tension with half the staff and five-eighths of the patients, and his emotional anguish over his dead family, thus relieving the mental block preventing him from saving he woman who can interpret the signs from the homeless man that will alert them to the bomb threatening the adorable child with the dead puppy. And the bomb threat was called in by the doctor’s long-lost evil twin, who killed the puppy in the first place.

27.11.05
I have been blessed with you. Thank you.

23.11.05
from yesterday
    Tonight, the chesterfield sits at the end of the driveway, spotlighted in the foggy cone of the yellow streetlight. To a stranger’s eye, it is immediately ‘70s: brown, navy and white synthetic fibres woven into exploded floral reminiscent patterns. The photo albums in the basement show me as a baby being introduced to my Grandparents on this couch. To me, all I see are memories.
    I remember taking the couch cushions and making them into forts, a dark retreat from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, my Mother’s parents, babysitting us, would make due without seat cushions and watch TV in a slightly lower and less comfortable position. At this age, I also remember watching Three’s Company and climbing up the armrests, and up the back, to sit on my Grandfather’s shoulders.
    I remember jumping from the arm of one couch onto the soft seat of the other, perhaps three feet away, reluctant, as always, to follow my sister’s fearless sense of adventure in our games of keep-off-the-ground. My mother hated when we did this, undoubtedly having visions of us cracking our heads open on the coffee table. The arms are wobbly now, unsurprisingly. more...

16.11.05
    Heeheeheehee, thanks again everyone.

03.11.05
    The pumpkins have yet to disintegrate into Aspergillus covered mounds of orange mush, and already we are receiving Christmas catalogs. Our community newspaper, already a hefty cylinder of flyers and a bit of news, came wrapped with yet another layer of shiny commercial goodness secured with an extra-large rubber band. Opening it was like peeling a red, tinsel and fake-happy-children infested onion. Jewels, sporting equipment, this year’s “hot toys”, all available for your purchasing pleasure. If you don’t buy these things, you’re a bad spouse/parent/all-around-person.
    Television, of course, is no better. We are treated to would-be-adorable kids spouting platitudes of filial love in a shameless attempt to manipulate parents into buying material goods from everyone’s favourite gigantic mega-retailer. Heaven forbid any real emotion be expressed, or any feeling not be attached to a product. The culture of Cute is in overdrive, made disturbingly over-sweet by the ad execs hovering inches off camera with puppy-dog eyes, plastic smiles, and hands in our pockets.
    The commercialization of Christmas isn’t new; it has long been the lament of the many who have felt the soul drop out of the entire season. Now it's starting earlier, ending later, changing our perception of time to serve its own purposes. How far will it go? Will Christmas sales coincide with Back-to-School? Will “Boxing Month” take us right through Valentine’s? We are teaching our children a mindset of want, then marveling at their dissatisfaction with what they have. The answer is not to consume nothing, that’s like saying the answer to obesity is to not eat anything. We do however, need a diet. We need to consume less, and consumer smarter. Does that mean this year’s Christmas sales won’t shatter last year’s? Probably. Will the economy slow down? Maybe a bit. Will the world implode because of it? No.
    I’m not being original, this is the message of many; but it needs to be repeated until more people, businesses, and governments listen. In the meantime, I’ll be turning my Christmas flyers into origami angels, then setting them on fire.

02.11.05
    Well that was optimistic. So they need me, but now there's the question of funding, which requires lots of paperwork with several levels of government and institutional bureaucracy. I'm supposed to get another call by the end of the week. We're discussing options. Confound this red tape. Someone give me a short term project I can do right now.

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