Kat’s Pause 

So we’ve probably all heard about Wii by now. I was of the same opinion as this guy — it’s silly but it works, and we’ll forget about it eventually.

Then yesterday, I heard the name spoken aloud for the first time, by a friend of a friend. Let’s just say it’ll take some getting used to. Not because of easy puns flying around, but because it just sounds so damn silly. While I suppose one could argue that that’s appropriate for a source of electronic amusement… all I know is, whether or not I purchase the thing is not going to be dependent on its name. They can call it the Hoojibbly for all I care — I’ll still buy it if I want the games for it and can afford it. I just won’t tell anyone about it.

- parents’ decisions (What is so frightening about an hour-long bus ride? Also I’m still mad at my mother for screwing with Ning last month. And why must two people who hate each other insist on living together?)
- OSAP’s inability to find my course (It’s Honours English. Not General English, not Honours English Language and Literature. How difficult is that? And what’s with the duplicate courses?)
- the Bible (Because it’s used for evil and idiocy and because I have a personal grudge against Christianity, particularly evangelists who won’t accept that I’d rather go to hell than back to church. I’ve recently learned that my father has become one of those people, harassing strangers downtown every Friday evening.)
- things that make me wake up confused when I’m trying to sleep (This includes arguing parents, bad dreams, and my own fears, especially of being late.)
- time when it moves too slowly (Just skip to September, already. I don’t even care about summer vacation, I just want to get out of here and start accumulating that student debt.)

Just saw “Waiting for Godot.” It was very good, much more entertaining than I expected, but just as intelligent as I’d hoped. The acting was superb and there was a lot of humour to keep my teenaged interest. I thought the end exemplified existential angst just expertly. And oh, his pants fell down. Hurr hurr!

Just a warning, I’ve changed some of my blog settings to try and filter out the massive amounts of spam comments. If you have any problems posting, let me know. Unless of course you just want to teach me to play Texas Hold ‘Em, in which case, screw off.

Imagining little brats… and I plan to email dooce soon to ask if I can quote her for an article I’m writing, maybe ask a couple questions too. Gasp scared!

Bless you and curse you, Khuffie, for getting me hooked on Scrubs. It provides the most wonderful distraction from the problems I should be dealing with. But don’t feel bad, I would’ve found something far inferior to distract myself with anyway.

How can you not win with a name like Dr. McNinja?

Silliness factor is there, of course, but it’s actually quite funny quite often too. And it spawned this, which I can’t believe hasn’t been thought of already.

In less amusing news: Have you ever had it happen that you want someone to think or not think a particular thing about you, and you do such a good job about it that they think just what you want to a, um, bad extent? Say, you don’t want to be seen as shy, and so you come off as obnoxious, or you want to look independent and then people start assuming you don’t need them. I hate it when life sounds like overdone TV drama.

Lastly, I had an urge to link this.

Thank you to everyone who wished me bad luck — I didn’t make it past the first round. I actually wasn’t expecting to get cut that early, but oh well! It’s nice to be done with it.

Yesterday flipped constantly between nervous excitement, extreme boredom, and just plain tiredness. Nervousness creeps in through your navel, climbs up your back, and infects your whole midsection. Most irritating was the hours-long debate over whether or not to eat: How likely would the food we put into our adrenaline-siezed digestive systems cause us more agony than a rumbling tummy? In the end we would settle for something small, splitting fries or nibbling food brought from home.

There was a lot less spontaneous singing than I’d expected. By now, everyone’s heard the warnings not to sing yourself hoarse and leave your best performance in the lineup.

We arrived at 6:30am to a shopping mall far too alive for that hour of the morning, despite all the closed stores. After several hours in line, we got our numbers, which we needed to wear on our stomachs for the rest of the day. Then it was a matter of waiting for our numbers to be called (we were in the 17900s). We wandered around the mall, where we were reprimanded for sitting on the floor and managed to score a table in the food court. It was strange to see so many tagged among so many untagged wherever we went; numbers marked people as either a friend or a threat, or both.

When the called numbers began approaching ours, we joined the dense crowd near the registration tables and waited, occasionally herded in some direction or another by security personnel. It was in that crowd that the highlight of the day occured: a large man with curly, shoulder-length blond hair performed Britney Spears’ dances while her music played over the speakers. He knew every move by heart, and needless to say the cameras and contestants adored it. We stopped nursing our tender throats to scream with glee when he was finished.

The day’s lowlight: In my 4:30am stupor, I forgot to put a band-aid on the cut I got last week, and my ankle promptly became infected. I ended up buying some at Wal-Mart, telling myself I’ll need first aid stuff for residence anyway.

Mix of both: I learned just how awful my English can become through constant text-messaging. Thanks Khuffie!

I found her over the internet again. Unintentionally — I was searching for my Writer’s Craft teacher’s email address, and found her Writer’s Craft anthology on our school website. And I finally saw what I’ve been secretly, angrily, guiltily waiting to find: what she wrote about me. A haiku about my hypocrisy in NYC. I’m not mad now, becayse it was somewhat true and I was stupid then. I like to think I’m a little smarter now… just not smart enough to stop obsessing over her yet.

Last night I had a dream that I ran into another former friend (V) and I think we tried to patch things up. I remember racing with her (straight from the Scrubs pilot I watched yesterday evening) and later on I died, which I’m pretty sure was unconnected. There was something about Ning in all that too. He’s sick, btw.

Please wish me bad luck for Canadian Idol this weekend. I don’t want to go far in that horrible exploitative monster of a TV show; I just can’t think of a good reason not to go since I told my friend I’d go with her anyway. We’re leaving at 3am tonight. I’m not really sure why.

Boy, I sure do wish I had a boyfriend who disclosed his existence to me more often than every couple of days. Maybe gave me his phone number if he changed it. I think that’d be nice.

Subject change: Oh Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack, I loved thee before I even saw thy movie.

And because I’ve had a happy evening of reliving old and loved things, I bring you: The Geek Hierarchy.

Poetry readings almond cookie Arrrriba! emo Christians chocolate milk iced caps benches sun stripping (I’m proud to say that I nearly caused an accident when I took off my shirt as some motorcylists passed by. Yes I had another shirt underneath and no I didn’t notice they were coming and no I have no shame) crappy downtowns laughing teachers misspelled names random nonsense poems.

I could talk like a normal person, but this takes less time.

Ning tomorrow maybe!

My sister and her boyfriend got engaged over the weekend, in the Grimace cage of a McDonalds in Venice. She always liked the colour purple. I fully approve; he’ll take good care of her. All the best, guys!

I am most definitely going to write some 10th Kingdom fanfiction tonight.

And Lost Time, that too. But Wolf and Virginia need to be written about.

I just read an awesome Pokemon fanfic. Pokemon. Fanfic. About Jesse and James and it’s GOOD.

Just wanted to mention that.

I finished day 1 of the Prince/Farah dialogue, but I’m not sure whether I like it enough. I’m possibly about halfway done the chapter. I um, actually wasn’t intending to write most of this conversation, but it just sort of happened.

Edit: Complete working draft can be found here.

Had an awesome day today wandering around Toronto with Alex/Liz/Khuffie (the latter of whom failed to kidnap me yet again).

Hooray for dancing, fountains, sunshine, sunglasses, forgotten cellphones, Asian lookalikes, Scottish outfits complete with moustache, 50-cent bread, pigeons on hot-sauce highs, and the taste of suffering (sorry, just sold the last one).

If you like it: Lemon Fingers by SC Kelly. I don’t suppose I have a chance against Lemon Zest, which is quite nice, but I can always dream.

I finished The Lovely Bones today — very sad, very good. If I’d read the first 100 pages alone rather than on the bus or at the computer, I would’ve bawled through it all.

So I felt like writing something pretty, and it was raining, with a pleasant warm wind that destroyed my hair, so I made up some lines about spring. I got it in my head to write a Shakespearean sonnet, but I suck at rhyming poetry, so all I managed was some amateur iambic pentameter. Obviously still very slightly less rough:

When rain in spring falls light through heavy air
And calloused eyes are juxtaposed with sweetness
The road releases patchy black reflections:
Trees with green-brown buds and white-brown birds

As thunder groans so loud within the clouds
And yellow darts lick down to tease the ground
In silent spaces just before the boom
I hear the sounds of winter slowly dying.

On brownest grass, the matted leaves lay blanketing
our last-year lawn, whose green we can’t remember now
While flowers dare to dream of bright tomorrows
and peep like finger-submarines below.

This is a much better pace — I was given a co-op assignment last week and did the interview over the phone this morning, then wrote the article (a short piece, 10 inches) in the afternoon, checked it in, and went over it with the editor all before 3pm. All that’s left now is getting a photo. It’s nice not to spend a month working on things before they get published.

In other news, holy cripes teenage boys are ridiculous. So are teenage girls, but I don’t hang around those too often.

Currently blasting the Prince of Persia soundtrack to drown out my four-year-old niece who is pounding on my keyboard a foot away and mashing buttons to erase my recorded tracks.

I hope I don’t damage her eardrums. Or mine.

Now back to work on Lost Time.

I was looking up stuff for Lost Time and came across this — the original screenplay for The Sands of Time. There are a ton of differences between it and the completed game. Remember hearing about how they wanted to use a sand griffin but had to cut it out because they didn’t have the technology yet? I thought that would’ve been just another enemy, but it’s actually an integral part of the gameplay and story. And we’re all familiar with the Prince’s odd striptease — after reading the screenplay, his bizzarre behaviour actually makes sense. Another neat thing was finding out what the Vizier is saying when he yells his magic words; they’re actually (supposedly) phrases in Sanskrit.

It’s a good read, and not very long since the majority of the gameplay is absent. I forgot what a great site Prince of Persia Legacy is. Good ol’ Zain.

I had a kitten named Pippin once. She was always misbehaving and she was adorable.

My other thing was published today. You can’t see the glorious full-page spread with its little fact boxes there, but I can assure you that it is quite glorious indeed. Much phone-calling and revising went into that, and I feel proud. It made my mommy happy.

I hate going to bed. It’s not that I don’t love sleep, it’s that when I’m in bed, even if I’m tired as hell, it takes a long time for me to actually get unconscious. And during that time, I can’t stop thinking, planning, and most of all worrying about things. I can fall asleep in seconds on the bus or when I’m with Ning, because there are so many distractions that stop me from thinking. It’s the silence that keeps me awake and brooding.

I don’t think playing music or white noise would help, because I either tune those things out fairly easily or else concentrate on them too much. So I stay up way too late doing whatever, putting off going to bed, in the hopes that I’ll be exhausted enough to fall asleep quickly. So far it hasn’t worked, and I just end up adding “late for co-op tomorrow due to oversleeping” to my list of worries.

It’d be really nice to spend the night with Ning. It’s so easy to relax with him. But when I tried to do it Saturday night, it blew up into a big ugly mess with my fundie mother calling Ning to guilt-trip him into a corner where he had to convince me not to come. My parents threatened everything on the earth that I could possibly need from them: if I left, it would mean no residence deposit cheque, which turned into no university tuition at all, and no signatures on the forms I’ll need signed before I turn 18 this summer — which would make it impossible for me to take out a loan to pay for schooling. So one night with Ning = no university.

I understand that they don’t want their baby daughter to be sleeping with her boyfriend. But they know I’m going to do it anyway regardless of whether I stay overnight or not, so why are they bothering? My mother still believes I’ll come back to the church. I want to laugh at her and cry with pity every time she says that.

What bothers me most is how they’ll put their religion before every other aspect of life, at the expense of anything. God’s rules are more important than raising your daughter to think for herself: if she has a problem, she can look it up in the bible or ask her pastor or her God-fearing parents. It doesn’t matter that she thinks that’s bullshit, because as Christians the parents know better. Where does that lead? I don’t think it’s a responsible parenting method to say “You have to listen to us because we said so, because God said so.” The only thing that’s going to teach a child is, once I’m free of my parents, I can do whatever the hell I want. There are no life values in “do it because I said to.”

All that said… I talked with Khuffie tonight about his family’s expectations of him because of their religion and culture, and it makes all my whining look like a rich kid with a papercut. For one thing, I’m allowed to date, and I can choose anyone I like regardless of race, class or culture. And even if my dad’s side of the family ostracizes me for marrying an Asian, at least I’ll know my parents won’t hate me. Once I get out of the house and no longer need their money, I’ll be relatively free to do what I want with my life. Khuffie gets to live with his parents’ expectations for his entire life. And he has it easier than some — he could’ve been betrothed to someone of his parents’ choosing. I never know quite what to feel when presented with these situations — people who obviously have it much harder than me in certain areas of their life. Is it appropriate to feel pity? All I can really think is, I know it works for some, but I’m glad I wasn’t born Muslim.

I stumbled upon my former best friend/Ning’s ex-girlfriend’s livejournal just now. And I snooped through the entire thing. And I have such an urge to leave a friendly note. And I think I’m going to cry. And now I’m crying.

Why do things have to get screwed up. I really miss those days, I miss her, I miss sharing secrets, I miss having close female friends.

And now I can’t stop crying. I’m sorry for all my ignorant selfishness in high school, for my stupid pathetic need for attention, for everything I did to lose my friends. We all screwed up somewhat, but you know what, teenagers are stupid and that’s what they do, and we’re all decent people even if we’re heinous bitches sometimes. I miss you guys.

I haven’t cried this hard in a long time… I had no idea I cared so much. I thought I was passed this, that my life was going pretty well; I’d justified and buried my regrets. But I was wrong, because I miss you guys and I’m so sorry I didn’t fix things and keep in touch.

So now I wonder, should I leave a comment? Just a hello, [I don’t hate you and] I hope you’re doing well. Because I do hope they’re doing well, all of them, even the ones who at times I wanted to drive a flaming stake through.

I’m sorry I said those things about you in New York. I’m sorry my attention-whoring ended so disastrously. I’m sorry I didn’t value your friendship even more than I thought I did. I’m sorry I didn’t realize all the stupid things I’d done until it was too late.

I miss you.