The good thing about having a crap weekend and subsequent days is that you can bask in your bitter mood, safe in the knowledge that it will all be over soon.

I find weddings surreal. They're like complicated programs of if-thens that all the women in my family but myself can run with their eyes closed. Who is innately born a wedding planner? Balaban women, that's who.

Part of the stresslessness of this one was the bride. Some brides are so worked up that if you don't get a manicure for their big day then they take it personally. (Christ, they're fingernails. Fingernails! I'd go on about the other shit I had to do just because I'm a girl but it's boring. Guys, you're lucky when it comes to special occasions. Put on a suit and stand there.) This bride was as easygoing as I've ever seen one. Regarding the minutiae (what kind of flowers/colour scheme/dress/etc.) of wedding planning, she left it to the mothers of the couple and said, "I just want to show up at a really great party wearing a dress I picked myself." Right on.

Fun as all hell. An open bar and a huge crowd of my crazy family and a meat bar. That's right, I said meat bar.

For the second time this season I spent six hours sitting in the park on a beautiful day. If this keeps up, it's going to be a good season. If I can hold down full-time employment and still sit in the park for 6 hours, it'll be even better. And if I can get full-time employment, well that's a pretty good start.

I've finally found the coolest thing to ever be posted on the internet. Pac-Manhattan is the live-action Pac-Man played on the grid that is New York City. 10 players (5 who do the running and 5 who sit in some room and communicate with their "players" by cell-phone) square off in Manhattan, running around and trying to tag each other according to the rules of Pac-Man.

The future is NOW.

I gave my resignation in to my 3-years-and-running job as a Book Bitch today. A couple of people cooed that they were so sad that I was leaving, and what could I really say but, "well, it's time." Something told me that, "yeah well me I'm just glad to be out of here," wouldn't bode well for the future.

In other news, I really like the book I just started on the train ride home today. All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman, a product of Coach House. There are about 249 superheroes in Toronto. Very few of them get paid for what they do. They are, by all rights, unspectacular. It's a good story, easy to read, thoughtful and entirely unportentious. I think I'll write my second-ever Letter to an Author to Mr. Kaufman.

I also don't much like the book I just finished before starting All My Friends are Superheroes. The much-discussed The Trouble with Islam by Irshad Manji is, I admit, thoughtful too and unportentiously written. But Manji is all over the place with her arguments (half the time I don't really know what she means and I'm coasting on the general theme) but, god damn woman, if you're going to write a testament against desert Islam, you must cite your sources! I couldn't believe what I was reading--not the claims she was making but that there was absolutely no effort made to back up her facts. And when you're writing about Holy Wars and people who are willing to kill for what they believe in, a good bibliography might be the loophole that pulls you from the car bomb.

I had that dream again where my subconscious is all, "I don't care if it's a dream or not, I'm not taking the blame for this one!"

I've got to stop dreaming that I'm hesitating before making out with someone. Then again, it probably makes Freud look like the proverbial ass and that's okay by me.

Me and Dora should go out for a coke.

When you're little, the start of summer will happen as soon as school ends, and then it's a juvenile sort of debauchery that no one need be ashamed of. Holy fuck, little Michelle used to think, I get to ride my bike around the suburbs for two fucking months!!!.

Now that I'm something of a grownup, or at least I'm not a kid, I've come to understand that your start-of-summer can happen any way you want it to. Yesterday after my measly half-day at the office, I called Graham and informed him that the time had arrived at last for us to hang out in Queen's Park. We did this for approximately two hours, then got pints on a patio 'cause hey, there's nothing socially unacceptable about drinking at 2 p.m. on a patio on a beautiful day. Then ate falafels in that weird little strip of parks until 6 p.m. while we watched the area's property values sink.

First sunburn of the season. Status: totally worth it.

Later, after the BPPA seasonal send-off with former classmates and BPPA kids, Broken Social Scene played a quiet and unannounced show at the Rivoli in support of Ibi Kaslik's new book Skinny. We missed the book-launch part of the night but were there with all the author and the band's friends and family. Nice crowd. Too bad I left the bad show early.

Well I thought I liked Broken Social Scene. In retrospect I think I was just hungry. Branden has informed me that my calling the free show crap is the only objective review possible; you never want to say you paid to see a bad show. Makes sense.

Read below for the bad part of the evening. If you feel like it. Me, I'd skip it. It sounds pretty whiny and bloggy to me.

Special Limited Edition Post:

Last night, following a mildly-traumatizing run-in with an ex,* I understood for good that this city is too damn small. Walking down the street is like the long dark tunnel of experiences you travel through before you die. But at the end of my promenade through one-night stands and people I want to avoid, I'm am still very much alive.

So here's the new rule: I never want to have another ex again. And so help me god, I won't. This is including (but not limited to) the following:

ex-boyfriends
ex-girlfriends
ex-lovers
ex-awkward-social-encounters
ex-makeouts
ex-fuckbuddies

The little pissant I saw on my way out of the club last night was the last ex I'm ever going to have. Too bad I want to run and/or vomit anytime I see him or he might even know for himself.




Notes
*run-in with an ex: I kept my cool. I didn't even roll my eyes at him, that's how much I kept my cool.

Notes on a job search best summarized by Chris Rock on minimum wage:

You know what it means when they pay you minimum wage, you know what they're tryin' to tell you? It's like, "hey, if I could pay you less, I would. But it's against the law.

And that's all I have to say about the working world today.

I am also extremely sick and it hurts to swallow or look down. How in the hell am I going to find the quarters on the ground? (And no jokes here about the other way to get your bus fare home.)

Bye bye internship!

Well there's one more hour until I'm done here today, meaning there's one more hour that I am an unpaid temp working for her school credit meaning that I have one more hour to be a student.

I feel like I should be eating Kraft dinner right now*. I should also be mixing alcohol in bathroom-soda combinations and smoking half a pack a day and getting high for 8 hours a day and making my own clothes out of other clothes and doing a little schoolwork once in a while.

I'm going to miss school.

Fortunately Sarah says that I'm never really out of school. "Michelle turns school into everything, and everything into school!" This makes my "doing a little schoolwork once in a while" comment somewhat controversial. Quel scandale ennuyeux!

notes:
*Kraft dinner: I learned in firstyear that there is a certain way of making Kraft dinner so that people eating fancy pastas are jealous of you.

1) Make 'ronis.
2) Drain, rinse, etc.
3) Put in a hella lotta butter in the pot and put it back on the stove. This is going to look like more butter than you're comfortable with. Melt it at a lower heat and throw the ronis back in. Coat evenly. Add milk; stir; add "cheese"; stir, still over medium heat, until it's real thick. None of that runny Kraft dinner. That's for prances.

current status: food editor of On the Danforth Magazine
current reading: Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
current feeling: really not too shabby. This will be improved by the sudden karmically-appropriate finding of about $600 so that I can fly to Vancouver

Well there's only two more days of interning here. This means there's only two more days that I'm a student. After this I'm looking for a job. (I don't really count the two half-days a week that they've offered me as employment.)

We got our copies of On the Danforth hand-delivered by Wade Ivan, whom I can only describe as "dynamic" no matter how hard I try to find another adjective. I am listed as the "dine" editor (how nouveau). This is not altogether far from where I actually do want to be in life.

(I also want to be that lady on the CBC who does "Beyond Burgers." She gets money to go look for cheap great food in the city. I do that all the time but no one gives me money for it.)

Back to work I think. And creative Vancouver-thinking. If I can make it to BC on the cheap then this might be a great summer after all. At the moment my travel plans are limited to London, Ontario. But you know, that might still rock.

mathematics is the science of avoiding intercourse with women

If Crudder ever makes "Proven Ways to Prevent Sex" into a book (and hot damn he should) then I hope I get to write the introduction. In high school I narrowly thwarted the advances of a psycho who demanded, "MICHELLE WHAT TURNS YOU ON!" and I answered, "salad."

Salad is unsexy.

Another good one is to say you get a lot of nosebleeds. You don't even have to elaborate; it just works. And if you think things are getting close and too-sexy, cry out, "nosebleed!" every few minutes and then say, "false alarm." It couldn't hurt to stick a wet Kleenex up your nose too. That's unsexy.

As it turns out, there is a right way and a wrong way to react when you learn that your friend and her boyfriend are a) swingers, and b) trying to get you to come home with them.

PSA: It can backfire when you lie and say you can't come back to the sexy couple's home for wild threesomes because you have an STI (STD). I wasn't really expecting "I have the Clap!" to be a turn-on.

P.S. I don't have the Clap.

It was a great weekend. Proof that if you don't hype something up, you're less likely to be disappointed. Thanks to my peoples who made the fine food, plus the presents besides.

There are big changes ahead and I have work to do. Now that I'm committed to working two days a week until early June I have enough time to have a sort-of vacation and accrue some minimal savings, work a little more at the liberry, maybe get Gramma to teach me how to make apple pie, and look for a job that will keep me off the streets--literally and figuratively.

I'm not banking on the French-needing job here any more. Who knows.