| Bake me a pie! |
[Mar. 5th, 2007|06:04 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  hungry | ] |
Bin#1853 says: when you want me to start supper, msn me. Bin#1853 says: Or die! Kerrie says: ok Kerrie says: I think I can accept that ultimatum |
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| The Children Are Right to Laugh, Ralph. |
[Feb. 21st, 2007|10:14 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  that music couldn't cut butter | ] |
Me, at Club:
"So who can tell me what is special about February?"
Nigerian Girl: "Black History Month!"
Me: "You bet it's Black History Month! Now who can tell me what is extra, extra special about March 6th, 2007?"
All girls: "???? Martin Luther King's birthday?"
Me: "Uh...no..."
Girls "??????????"
Me, with enthusiasm: "March 6th 2007 is the FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of GHANA'S INDEPENDENCE, the FIRST African country to end colonial rule" (Note, Sudan actually obtained independence in 1956 but for some reason we never count it, I have no clue why?)
Me: "And that is why next week, to celebrate Black History Month, we're going to have a Ghanaian Independence Party! I'm going to bring in some Ghanaian music-"
Nigerian Girl *look of horror on face*
Me: "Oh don't worry it's going to be good Ghanaian music".
Nigerian Girl looks unconvinced.
Me: "Ok, ok, Ghana doesn't exactly have the best music in Africa but...uh...do you like the song Shordy?"
Nigerian Girl "Yeah I like that one".
Me: "Ok so I'll bring in Shordy and then some music from other countries".
Sorry Ghana...you lost Africa Idol. |
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| Props of the day |
[Feb. 14th, 2007|08:16 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  I caught you a delicious bass. | ] |
I give mad props to musicians who aren't afraid to bass the hell out of their music. And I'm not talking about the fish. I do NOT give mad props to journalists (or even more shamefully, academics) who cite Thatcher in any argument to do with women in politics. I think it should be put on the same triteness rating as comparing X to what Hitler did once. See Team Rainbow for more details (more bitterness). |
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| I have Sports Opinions now! In other news, Bears do Shit in Woods. |
[Feb. 2nd, 2007|11:07 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  confused | ] |
Cashier at Safeway, after argument with other customer:
"Which is better, colts or bears?"
Me: *thinking hard*
Cashier: "Just say colts".
Me: "Actually, I was going to go with bears. I think bears are pretty cool".
Cashier: "Really? But better than horses?"
Me: "It's really hard to compare domesticated with wild animals".
Cashier: "You can ride horses".
Me: "That's true, but they are worse for the environment. You know, the methane?"
Cashier: "But bears produce that too".
Me: "Bears are part of the nitrogen cycle!"
Cashier: "Well, that's true".
Me: "Ok, I'm just bullshitting you, I have no opinion."
Cashier: "No, it's true. They are part of the nitrogen cycle". *looks sad*
I have a feeling Tim's going to kill me, either for my ignorance or for having a wrong opinion on this. I'm not even sure if we were talking about football or some other sport Nolan never talks about. |
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| Ah, Calgary...get me the fuck outta here. |
[Jan. 7th, 2007|10:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | low bigotry feistiness | ] |
Good work on the no-smoking at clubs bylaw. Next time try a "no brawling, shooting, and ramming cars into people at clubs" bylaw.
Oh, and for the Quotable Quotes section, here is one from my feisty coworker who witnessed the brawl:
"So the cops said wait we have to ask you some questions and I'm like fuck you, I'm going home and the cop just says uuuuhbnb or something and I'm like fuck you I'm drunk and I don't understand your stupid question. So the cops said uh, were you fighting? I said fuck you man, I'm white, do I look like I was fighting?"
Classic stuff, cowgirl.
I can feel this hick town radicalizing me even further.
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| Yes it's a meme; shoot me. |
[Dec. 19th, 2006|09:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  disappointed | ] |
From almost beginning to end, 2006 SUCKED. Herein lies the wretched tale, chopped up for you into a series of mostly retarded questions. Sorry for all the sulking below but I can only cram in so much Pollyanna-esque chin-upping into one year. If it helps (and by that I mean helps me look like less of a total loser) I have a feeling that year 2007 will be the big comeback.
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| Re-Tales II: the Slack-Jawed Yokels. |
[Dec. 17th, 2006|04:32 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  evil | ] |
Beavis: "Huh huh. Ask her if they have goat's milk for the bath or something".
Butthead: "Hey do you sell goat's milk here?"
"Her": "No".
Butthead: "She says no".
Beavis: "Huh huh. I thought they like, sold it here. Ask her again".
Butthead: "So there's no such thing as goat's milk?"
"Her": "There is such a thing as goat's milk; it comes from a goat".
now fuck off and go talk about someone else in the third person.
Beavis and Butthead: "huh huh..." *shuffle away* |
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| Surtout Liberte |
[Dec. 16th, 2006|10:40 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sore | ] |
Bureaucrat: "Everyone who applies for land through the government's homesteading program has to wait three years. The same rule applies to English-speaking whites too".
Bureaucrat translator: "He says that the whites also have to wait three years"
Gabriel Dumont: "Yes, but OUR ancestors owned this land-the rules should be different".
Here is the game: find the book closest to you (in my case, Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography), turn to page 123, and record sentences 6, 7, and 8.
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| My Pagan/Christmas list: A Heartwarming Tale of Greed. |
[Nov. 23rd, 2006|10:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thirsty | ] |
As many of you have noticed, my once robust blog has dwindled down, below even the level of humorous YouTube links and memes of interest, to hardly anything. Why you ask? Does nothing piss me off anymore? That can't be true. Have I been worked to exhaustion lifting stock for the Body Shop, unable to even sit at a computer? Hardly. The answer which I'm sure will shock you all down to your very fundaments, is that I'm too fucking lazy.
And yet, the prospect of Free Stuff compels me to dust off my typin' fingers, brush the Toblerone remains from the keyboard, and blog again. Who can pass up writing a Christmas list, even if they aren't Christian, have no friends and -in theory- despise our consumerist wasteland of a society?
Therefore, for every item on my Christmas list this year I will write a previously unblogged anecdote. I should inform you all that this makes A LOT of logical sense in my mind. I also apologize for the absurd length of this posting, which I will NOT put under a cut because none of you voted in my African Idol contest. That shall be your e-punishment!
1) Back in the good old days at UBC, when women were women and students were poor, I took a course on Poverty and Inequality taught by Dr. Ana Ferrer. During one unit of the course we learned about the benefits of in-kind provisions for the poor versus money transfers which could be spent on a variety of goods. Dr. Ferrer navigated her way through much anti-poor prejudice from students such as "well those lazy poor crackers will just spend money on booze anyways" and "as a white, urban Canadian born into an upper class family in this equitable meritocracy known as capitalism , why should my taxes be spent on the poor. Would it not be more economically sound to spend our taxes on life-size Swarovski crystal ducks for the hard-working rich?".
The moral of this story is multifold. Firstly, I am poor. Secondly, if you want to buy me a present you face an economic choice: money transfers versus in-kind donations. As Dr. Ferrer taught me, if you simply give me a big bag of money I will spend it on all sorts of things you can't control. Like groceries. Like Nolan's tuition. Like a sensible winter coat-just ask my mom! Now do you really want me to remember you as the person who financed my milk and frozen pizza consumption during the early days of January? I sincerely hope not. You can avoid this predicament by giving me money in the form of gift certificates to places I like to shop, such as the Lush store, any kind of fancy-ass tea emporium, or Chapters. As a poor sucker who, as my capitalist friends so aptly point out, would far rather beg for a handout than do an honest day's work, I am willing to accept either a big bag of money or in-kind donations. I just want to ensure that the donor (you) is making an educated decision. Finally, and this is really the most important point, I want a life-size Swarovski crystal duck. Any other sort of duck will not do.
2) One day last year, Nolan and I were walking through the biggest market in Accra, Ghana. We had spent a few months up north and both of us were trying to learn the local languages. Nolan focused on learning the language of the Mossi people and I tried to learn Kusaal which was spoken by the majority of my coworkers. However, we were living as far north as you can possibly live in Ghana, and neither of these obscure languages were spoken by anyone south of our neighborhood. As I said, we were navigating our way through a bustling, chaotic marketplace which was absolutely huge. The first point of interest here is that on that day, I heard a Ghanaian use sarcasm. I asked a merchant how much his shirts cost. He said ten dollars. I said that's way too much. He responded with "what, like you can't afford it?". It was the first and only time I have heard a Ghanaian person use or understand sarcasm. By that point I had already learned to edit it out of my communication style. The next point of interest was that as we were walking along this narrow, crowded pathway I heard someone behind yelling something like "a-wo, a-wo" or perhaps it was "a-go, a-go". Because Nolan and I never learned any Twi, the dominant language in Ghana, we had no clue what this meant. As it turns out, it means "get the hell out of the way, now!". By the time we turned our heads, we had to jump out of the way of a large, overpacked cart on wheels careening through the crowded walkway.
Anyways this anecdote is really meant to illustrate how communication is so important when travelling the world-whether it be language, means of communicating ideas, or non-verbal communication such as "my, I observe this large cart careening my way, I should move". Therefore, I would like to get a multi-media language learning kit of Swahili where I can study, read, and listen to basic Swahili. One of those big, expensive ones with CDs and books included. It is a useful language spoken in many different African countries, so useful in fact that it was used to name the majority of the characters in The Lion King. You can't argue with that.
3) In the Christmas 2005 special issue of Economist magazine, I read an absolutely fascinating article on relative poverty. The article compared the lives of two people considered poor-an unemployed trailer park hick living in Backwater, US, and a Congolese physician living and working in Kinshasa. The article examined many different dimensions of poverty that are not normally revealed in the statistics, and left me with a clearer sense of the complexity of factors you need to think about when examining the lifestyles of people around the world. For example, the poor American had a car and a TV, but the Congolese doctor was well respected and honoured in his society. There was really no central lesson or conclusion; the article remained open-ended and questioning in nature. But if you really want to hear my central lesson it is this: I want a subscription to The Economist. My theory is that it may slow and perhaps even reverse the rapid atrophy of my brain.
4) During our last month in Ghana, Nolan and I, with the help of our friend Razak, bought a darling little goat whom I named Patience due to her sweet demeanor. In retrospect, I realize now that much of my fondness towards this goat was symbolic of our ability to settle in and feel like Northern Ghana was home. She represents a brief turning point where we had chased away the cockroaches, adapted to the sporadic supply of water and food, started to recover from all the malaria, built shelves in our home (you know, to put things on and stuff...) and had actually started to feel content in our own way with all the difficulties of our life. Every morning before work I would wake up and make some tea, sit on my step and observe the goat eating breakfast, which in some irrational way gave me hope for the day ahead. Unfortunately, our neighbors told us to keep the goat tethered for a week but later we learned you are actually supposed to tether your goat for a month. That is why our goat ran away when we let it loose after a week. That same day my boss broke two months of silence to scream at me for getting malaria too much (yeah, that was ALL ME) and for consorting with "unscrupulous" (read: Muslim) people. I guess you could say I "lost my Patience" that day. Har. Har.
That day really marked the beginning of the end. It was the liminal space between tolerable unreasonable difficulty and intolerable unreasonable difficulty. This is not at all connected to something I want for Christmas. It is just an anecdote showing how something you value and feed and care for, like your international development career, can just slip away and disappear through your fingers, even if you tried your best. I really just want my little goat back and I am still having a hard time accepting that I will never see her again. At the same time I am appreciating in retrospect that our ephemeral goat did leave a permanent gift. The fact that we did have that time of contentedness, we know with absolute certainty that we are capable of withstanding a moderate amount of unreasonable difficulty, and even turn it into happiness. I would also like to vindictively add that the volunteer that arrived after me actually refused to live in our house because it was too squalid-and that was after we fixed it up. Wuss.
I know that while my irrational wish to get back my little goat will never happen, I can still see my future ahead of me and know what I'm capable of. Certainly I'm aware that compared to the life of a trailer-park dweller in America, or a Congolese doctor getting shaken down by the police in Kinshasa, or a girl trying to get an education in Ghana, my life is completely free of hardship. But I still want things, and even though I have a life expectancy a good 20 years longer than the other two-thirds of our world, I'm impatient and I want them now so that as soon as I get them I can start working on the things I'll want after that. I should reiterate here that this anecdote does not actually end with a Christmas list request...sucker! If I don't get an Economist subscription or a Swarovski Duck, that does not matter as long as I get what I really want out of my life. |
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| The Great African Music Throwdown! |
[Sep. 25th, 2006|11:29 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
The polls are open! Finalists have been collected from the six African Giants of Music: Cote D'Ivoire, Mali, South Africa, DR Congo and...uh, Benin.
Check out these fabtastic songs and vote for your favourite or favourites. Your vote counts extra if you give a reason.
WHO WILL BE THE TOP CONTENDER?
Will it be:
Nkalakatha by South Africa's powerhouse Mandoza....
...the soulful solos of Mali's genius Salif Keita singing Folon...also check out his rockin' HIV/AIDS awareness song...
...or Benin's Angelique Kidjo, exuberatly singing Agolo...she also happens to be a UN Special Ambassador for Child's Rights...
... The Way Kungakhona by Southern Africa's hit group Bongo Maffin...
...the ever imaginative Awilo Longomba and his dancing banana girls representing the DRC...
Here are some other hits by Awilo by the way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF7T2WO2K9E Cache Cache (with the dancing bananas)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUfF8PelXkM Karolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3ihP6OUKV4 Abidjan Debout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvilu7BCxuo Faux Dossier
...and last but not least, Cote D'Ivoire giants Magic System with their first amazing hit, Premier Gaou!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezz0FrEyNOU and here is its sequel, Un Gaou a Paris.
Which country will dominate??!?!??! Vote today!
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| It's Arrested De-[60%] |
[Sep. 18th, 2006|08:13 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  hypocritical! | ] |
I've been downloading Futurama for like 5 solid days now and I'm screaming along at 25% completed. The little comments section is full of h8 towards all the people who download it and then don't seed it.
And I've got something to say to these selfish people: do you think you can just TAKE something for FREE without even giving anything?!!??!?!?!?!?!?!
THAT IS NOT THE SPIRIT OF BITTORRENT, PEOPLE. For shame. For shame. |
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| Fuck You, Just Fuck You. |
[Aug. 27th, 2006|02:22 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  fuck you | ] |
When I grow up, I want to live in a van down by the river. |
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| Betcha |
[Aug. 11th, 2006|11:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  slightly less poor. | ] |
Tristan and Milan's bet on the real cost of electricity 30 years from now reminded me of two things.
First, it reminded me of the same bet made by the die-hard ecologist and die-hard economist back in 1980. I forget who won but they both came off looking like idiots, in my ever so humble opinion. Ok I just checked and the economist won. Too bad he couldn't put his oh so powerful economic forecasting to some meaningful use.
I'm going to assume that the two of you were going about the bet on somewhat more intelligent terms, and that both of you will someday be known for doing something much more important.
Secondly, it reminded me of a shorter-term bet I made with Tristan earlier, that I just looked up on Wikipedia and other sources.
HOGTOWN IS A NAME FOR TORONTO NOT OTTAWA. I checked Wikipedia and you can check anywhere you like.
You can pay by cash, credit card, or why not just go ahead and make a donation somewhere and tell me about it, I'll take your word for it. |
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| Sassy Duo Hits Vancouver! |
[Aug. 1st, 2006|10:53 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pink and brainy. | ] |
After a way-too-long separation due to me being in Africa and Meghan being in sucky Windsor designing robotic ligands, we hit the town today!
Activities included:
hitting up the All India Sweets Buffet,
going to Starbucks twice and Tim Horton's once.
walking down Robson in urban-chic manner.
walking down Hastings in urban-slum manner.
getting some "insider tips" for my interview with Lush on Monday.
army and navy
pictures in front of Gastown clock.
telling off snooty, unreasonable lady in skytrain and then trying not to laugh for the rest of the ride.
Subjects expounded upon:
Pretending to be "too good" for pop cultural phenomena such as reality TV is lame.
Meghan's old roomates Suri and Erin were awesome, while that other one was crazy.
It was appropriate for the Ghanaian villagers to laugh at Kerrie that time the bus drivers hit her with the chair, five times, by accident.
Telling your ESL students to draw cartoons for your amusement is a completely appropriate pedagogical technique.
Salespeople should not "correct" customers who assert that $8 for 100 grams of soap is a rip-off.
The rise of Cafe Crepes in Vancouver is mysterious and unsettling.
Meghan is smarter while drunk than most are while sober.
Meghan handles liquor way better than Kerrie. (Not tested empirically today but ample historical evidence).
Vancouver doesn't have a 'homeless" problem; it has a voting problem.
OPI's "Bright" nail polish is not really that bright.
It is completely appropriate to make jokes about groups to which you belong, such as the English, Catholics, Dutch, etc.
"It is hard to say which one of us is Pinky and which is Brain because we're both a bit of both".
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| Quotation Quackery! |
[Jul. 31st, 2006|01:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  working | ] |
The Trio in my English class I will individually name Blue, Pink, and Black. Because each day they wear those colours.
Pink, urgently: "I have a question!"
Me: "shoot".
Pink: "Vegetarians don't eat animals right?"
Me: "Um..yep, that's the point."
Pink, with anxiety: "But do they eat animal crackers?"
Me: *cracking up*
Pink: "Well, do they!?!?"
Later, in class:
Black: "OMG do you have a blog!??!"
Me: "Yep, I have a few blogs...LJ, Xanga, Blogger..."
Black: "Xanga! Give us your blog address!"
Pink: "I'll add you!"
Me: *horrified*. "Uh...kids, I can't let you read my blog."
Trio: "Please! Give us the address!"
Me: "No, I would get fired. Besides, it's not ok for children. It would corrupt your young minds".
Pink, confused: "...that doesn't sound like something you'd do".
Pink, reading her story: "Once there was a mother duck giving birth to a beautiful baby duck..."
Later, at dinner with Melissa and Mohammed:
Mo: "I actually had a job interview at the Gap".
Mel & me: "Oh, how did it go?"
Mo: "Well...the manager asked why I wanted to work there and I said, I needed a job to make some money".
Me: "Awesome, you were honest!"
Mo: "She said, they actually want to hire people who are really passionate about Gap clothing. I said, isn't that kind of...shallow?"
Me: "hahahahahah"
Mo: "So she just ended the interview".
In other news, I have found a place in Calgary, thankfully. That's one 100-lb weight off my back. Now I just have to figure out how to pay for it. I think a large part of why it was hard to find a place was Nolan's insistance that we try to find one for under $500.
Also: it was stupid to write this at the bottom since it is more important than ducks giving birth: the woman I'm subletting from changed her mind about taking her room back on the 13th and so I have to move out by the 7th. Can I sleep on anyone's couch for a few days? I promise to fake cheerfulness in the event of yet another depressive episode.
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rainbow_grrrl's journal
josephine, josephine.
ME LOVE YOU LONGTIME!
urban chic