November 28, 2004

"An Embarrassing Incident

I never forget the embarrassing incident that happened on the New Year Eve of 1997 when all girls went to the boys’ dormitory to celebrate the New Year. I remember I sat on one boy’s bed, threw my red gloves on it and then fell into the celebration. After that, taking “my red gloves” without a careful look, I went outside with others and then put them on. Oh my god, it was not my gloves, but the boy’s red underpants. I felt very embarrassed and stashed them into my pocket at once before the other girls noticed me. Later, I threw the underpants away stealthily and failed to sleep well. On the next morning, the boy whose bed I sat on came into the classroom with a smile on his face and my gloves in his hand, and walked to the front of the classroom, my face turned red immediately, because I was really afraid that he would tell the classmates what happened last night. Thanks god, he just asked: “anybody forgot her gloves?” and then put it on the first desk. After the class, when everybody left, I took my gloves back and threw them away too. I have kept this embarrassing secret in my mind without telling anyone."

Bing and I are having a conversation about her english assignment I am supposed help her take out the little mistakes. Except I think its fine the way it is..

November 27, 2004

I went out and partied like it was 1992 last night. I can still feel it in my fingertips and in my blood alcohol level.

The night in brief:

Arrived at Laurens house at 7:30pm late, She was still talking to a talkative gallery rep and getting progressively more irritated. He was noticing the house fill with people eating pizza and drinking coffee and beer and he wasn't caring.

We left at about 8:20pm and headed to the stadium which was at Eduard Mont-petit metro, which is a part of montreal that no-one knows where it is. ie; on exiting the metro one says where the fuck am I?"

Arrived at the venue, really came to terms with the fact that it was stadium concert. Saw 35 year-olds climbing rock gardens to bud the line.

While entering the building a joke was started about how we should have done BT's before leaving the house. A security guard overhearing our conversation
laughed and said, "if you aren't checking your coat go straight in." This is what it means to be old. No-one thinks you are hiding drugs anymore.

Some facts about the venue/atmosphere.

1/ It is usually a sports arena. The last time I saw a concert on a playing field/hockey rink it was Tool and the place was varsity arena.

2/ There was one beer hut for 2000 people. and that hut sold nothing but bud. This facet of the concert experience was an excercise in what it must be like to be an American.

3/ The second and last time I put myself in the beer-line, I had a lame (on my part) disgreement with a tiny gurl who would have kicked my ass in the mosh. She and her friend pushed in front of me in line, and somehow, my naive-ity, a total lack of balls and an inability to recall the beer-lines of my youth, led me to say "umm excuse me, do you mind if I go ahead of you in line, since I was here first?" yes I know, so you can shut-up about whatever you were going to say about my lame-ness. To her credit she didn't openly mock me to anyone else. It was also during my tenure in the beer-line that I remembered what we used to do at concerts, namely, drugs. Whoops. No wonder I didn't know what I was doing in line.

4/ Speaking of drugs, I have to wonder what the people booking the opening acts were smoking since the band that immediately preceded the pixies were so horrendously bad it defies my ability to contrast and compare. The only way I can describe it is to say the lead guitarist was wearing really tight blue jeans, not overdyes and every single member of the band had hair past their shoulders. In terms of music. It was as if Zz top, Poison and Screaming trees got together in hell to make french rock.

5/ The average age of the crowd was 20 - 40 which was refreshingly old compared to the indy rock shows I have been to lately, where I feel like a grandma. Except that the split seemed to be between those that wanted to mosh and those that didn't. So the moshers kept trying to break it up in the middle of crowds of mean spirited oldsters. Which was us. At some point Ned stopped some guy from Pogo-ing Lauren to death by saying "While I appreciate your desire to rip this place apart, why not wait until that guy has finished" (referring to another pogo-boy)

Anyways it was primarily an execise in enjoyable if premature nostalgia once the Pixies came on, so I have no criticism of the concert since it wasn't really a concert more of a group hug.

Once they hit the stage it became apparent that this was not to be some normal run of the mill rock show. It was going to be a giant sing-a-long kind of a rockshow, where the quailty of the music or the performance is in fact subsumed by the audiences need to believe in the beauty of their youth once again.

And for what it was it was great. I won't go into the little fuck ups, the fact that by song 5 it was evident that they aren't that fired up about their old work like we are.

I will mention that they completely garage-saled monkey gone to heaven. I will also mention that they played both versions of wave of mutilition. I will mention that during the encore Kim Deal cried which really help stupid gullible me get over the fact that my 45 $ ticket is fueling the various addictions held by the band members (jeez kim really loves us.. etc).

I am surprised by the nostalgia thing. Frankly I am too young to be feeling like my vanished youth needs to be re-experienced already. Mostly I am glad my youth is vanishd, I had terrible judgement (see comment about tool concert) and I had the worst taste in clothes.

But obviously, since time is so much faster now than it was for my parents, the next ten years are going to be about marketing my past to me in the form of big ticket concerts and probably re-mastered indy pop classics.

Okay.. I am going to add more here later I need to go make another pot of coffee.

November 23, 2004

Well.. I was reluctant to write about this topic this morning because I felt really defensive about it. But now I am trying to avoid a paper so I might as well dive in.

I got a call from a friend I haven't heard from in a while and it turned into a big discussion on the careful use of pronouns in polite, queer-conscious company, and my apparent learning disability where all that is concerned.

In plain language I mess up my shes and hes when in trans-company and it's not cool. One might even think it was deliberate it happens so often.

So after this phone call where I became defensive, I biked off to see another friend, who is incredibly sensitive and magnanimous where most things are concerned. But when I mentioned this problem I had with gender sensitivity, she said, "what's wrong with being a boy or a girl?" Which is exactly the line that I, in being defensive, was taking.

Then I felt put into that weird position of disagreeing with a view I myself had just been espousing once I heard it coming from someone else's mouth.

The question I am asking myself now is: What is it about gender fluidity, or the possibilty that gender is a nifty lie we all tell each to create some kind of order, that makes me uncomfortable?

...and clearly the answer to that is somewhere on the road between one friend opinion and the other's.

I guess as a last word for now, part of my problem is: I don't think that to question the validity of gender roles one has to dispense with them in ones own life and I think that is where I run into mental friction that resultsin a lack of true analysis of my own gendred subjectivity and my reactions to others. It is hard to be fence-sitting and that seem sto be where I have been on the gender issue since I was a jogging pants-wearing barbie-playing tomboy of 8 years old.

November 17, 2004

Disclaimer : the normal high level of dialogue readers associate with the flink is compromised tonight in favor of a more salt of the earth, plain-spoken style typically associated with folk wisdom. no reason, dig it. It is also not about me. I have to say that. not me, not angry not I. little evil face just called me a chicken.
now she is clucking at me.

Love is like compost
why??

because it starts out as food, and you eat it and it makes you happy and life is fun, but then it starts to go bad (maybe because of the fight you had last night) and smell funny and you say oh boy it looks like I have to go stick it in the compost bucket and it starts to fester and go rotten (cause you're still mad)

and then fruit flys lay their eggs in it and it suppurates and then you have to go out into the cold cold outside and empty the bucket into the larger pile of crap that is in your backyard (or your subconscious) or whatever, and then it festers some more, and it makes a big stink and it gets hot and it bugs the neighbours and lots of insects and small animals live in it, but in the end it makes lovely crumbly fertile earth for new growth. It's better than sheep shit, but oh, the crap you had to wade throught to get there.

That was dictated to me by little evil face, I am but a conduit for her heartwarming philosophies.