January 28, 2005

So I am on-hold for a friend who had a nervous breakdown a while back and is at home with her parents recovering.

A fitting start I think, for the entry I want to write today.

Yesterday I had a marathon coffee with two friends who lost family members this year.

The days before that I spent reading a "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", mulling over how I wanted both to get a tattoo about my mother, and make a comic book about her being invisible and watching me cope with her death, in the vein of "A Wonderful Life"except she doesn't get to come back in the end and I have to get over it.

All this mulling and thinking and perhaps it's true, over-analyzing of lifes recent events have led me to some startling conclusions about a quality I had previously taken to be without question one of the most important and neccessary human attributes in our arsenal of coping skills - namely strength.

January 26, 2005

I have gotten something up for my portfolio site.

About time, it's not yet done but at least people can see something.

It's here;

Flink Design

The only problem is that I have used an absolute div to pin the footer to the bottom of the page which is not supported in earlier versions of ie mozilla etc.

I fear that there is some werid little jscript thing i have to do to get it down there for real, and so tomorrow is going to be all about still working on the basic divs.

Addendum.. the site has not been re-designed to look like a 404 error.

January 24, 2005

So I watched Desperate Housewives for the first time yesterday. I had heard so much about it that I really expected dry wit and social satire a la Henry James, boy was I ever dissapointed.

It reminded me of the season of Santa Barbera I watched with Cynthia Spry in Grade 7 after school. Everyone is adulterous, murderous and essentially humourless.

Most off-putting was at the end of an episode where:

A stalker/pharmacist trys to poison his paramours nasty lawyer husband.

A concerned single-father/baby and wife murderer trys to mess with his sons pre-pubescent love life.

An adulterous dad is defended by a "possibly" equally adulterous son, to said sons wife.

At the end of this litany of poor behviour, the dead-wife narrator says in a very very prurient and judgemental voice. "There comes a time in everyones life where they must become responsible adults, they must sacrifice what they want for what they know is right. etc.. etc.."

American morals make me suspicious. maybe it was meant to be ironic, except I know irony and this show is not it.

That being said I want to talk a little about the problem with Canadian morals:

Stephen Harper is digging a grave for them with a shovel made of incredibly ill-timed rhetoric.

However, one thing he said on the subject of gay marriage caught my fancy. Apparently if gay marriage is allowed, then we are but steps away from legalizing polygamy which just wouldn't do at all, for any number of reasons, like for example, spousal benefits becoming a real bitch to administrate.

I say hell, lets give up the fight for gay marriage and start working for polygamy so that everyone can get involved regardless the gender of their chosen loved one(s).

The problem with the gay marriage debate was always that people who didn't identify as queer could only give support as a peanut gallery they didn't really have a stake in it. Even the far right hate this because it means the only real weapon they have is the completely false assertion that two members of the same sex getting married will hurt the sanctity of their hetero-normative union.

With the polygamy debate all us Canadians can really get into it because anyone can be polygamous It will bring everyone together instead of dividing the nation into people who are gay and everyone else, which is a scary division and doesn't really fly with what I personally believe to be the actual case, which is that everyone (even Mr. Harper himself) is sitting somwehere on a vague and highly useful continuum of behaviour and preferences. Including the desire to mate monogamously for life with one person.

January 21, 2005

I should start a blog-roll just to add this blog called, Couldn't sing...

My friend Stephen is in Hungary doing an internship at a Hungarian Wildlife magazine. I think.

Anyways, he's really gotten his sea-legs vis a vis writing poignant and funny entries about his time overseas, my favorite part thus far;

"We're going to Prague. I feel the same grim humiliation that comes over me every time I realise I am making about 4% of the effort I could be to overcome language and interpersonal barriers. I realise for the hundredth time in the past three months that I am often a deeply unfriendly person. I entertain the idea of taking up smoking so that I'll have an excuse to interact with strangers, then realise that cancer is not worth a handful of superficial connections with people I'll never see again. They invented books so that people like me wouldn't have to actually communicate with anyone in person more than absolutely necessary."

write it Mr. Guy