out of the house for summer
Jul. 6th, 2010 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Mushrooms and bok choy simmering in butter and black pepper, the windows all open, sentences running through my mind, practiced words falling off my tongue like dry, pressed flower petals, to divide fractions, invert the second fraction and multiply, to multiply fractions, multiply the numerators, then multiply the denominators, reduce all to their lowest terms, attempting a memorization of everything I can before my tests this weekend. A gift, but terrifying. I am more hopeful than I was a week ago, but I can't stop feeling doomed. According to the website, the five tests take seven hours and twenty-five minutes to complete. Doomed.
Tests aside, this upcoming weekend looks fun. Not only is there going to be a steampunk minicon at Barclay Manor on Saturday, World Cup is wrapping up this weekend, which means my neighborhood, Commercial Drive, will be closed to cars and open to PARTY!! Flags, shouting, free food, noise-makers, facepaint, dancing, music, and thousands of people gleefully losing their minds from how utterly freaking awesome it is that some guys in ridiculous socks kicked a ball around some other guys in ridiculous socks and between some posts. Wahoo! Seriously, though, it's epic. EPIC. People travel from as far away as Portland to celebrate here. I came out of the last celebration with a frighteningly scarlet sunburn because my trusty SPF 75 was washed off by an intensely enthusiastic restaurateur shouting ITALIA! ITALY! ITALIA! and spraying the crowd with shaken bottles of champagne. Fwish. No more sunscreen. And rainbows everywhere. Did you know champagne makes especially pretty rainbows when misted through the air? Me neither, not until that party.
Also coming up: The Vancouver Folk Festival from July 16-18th, the Celebration of Light nee The Symphony of Fire, (USA July 21st, Spain July 24th, Mexico July 28th, and China July 31st), and a castrated Illuminares Lantern Procession on July 24th for those who want to try and cram thousands of people into a small building after parading their children through Crackton.
Tests aside, this upcoming weekend looks fun. Not only is there going to be a steampunk minicon at Barclay Manor on Saturday, World Cup is wrapping up this weekend, which means my neighborhood, Commercial Drive, will be closed to cars and open to PARTY!! Flags, shouting, free food, noise-makers, facepaint, dancing, music, and thousands of people gleefully losing their minds from how utterly freaking awesome it is that some guys in ridiculous socks kicked a ball around some other guys in ridiculous socks and between some posts. Wahoo! Seriously, though, it's epic. EPIC. People travel from as far away as Portland to celebrate here. I came out of the last celebration with a frighteningly scarlet sunburn because my trusty SPF 75 was washed off by an intensely enthusiastic restaurateur shouting ITALIA! ITALY! ITALIA! and spraying the crowd with shaken bottles of champagne. Fwish. No more sunscreen. And rainbows everywhere. Did you know champagne makes especially pretty rainbows when misted through the air? Me neither, not until that party.
Also coming up: The Vancouver Folk Festival from July 16-18th, the Celebration of Light nee The Symphony of Fire, (USA July 21st, Spain July 24th, Mexico July 28th, and China July 31st), and a castrated Illuminares Lantern Procession on July 24th for those who want to try and cram thousands of people into a small building after parading their children through Crackton.
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Date: 2010-07-07 04:45 am (UTC)http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2100#more-2100
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Date: 2010-07-07 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-10 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-07 08:20 am (UTC)I've got some time on Thursday before work, if you want to grab a coffee and go over anything you're not totally sure about. :)
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Date: 2010-07-07 08:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-07 07:34 pm (UTC)Repost from the Archives
Date: 2010-07-07 09:07 am (UTC)I could hear his voice in my head as I clung to her in her bed, one hand wrapped around a Fredrick's of Hollywood bra. She was warm, like a kiln in the springtime running at full blast, full of student art projects and little misshapen ashtrays. I could smell her scent on her hair - fruit, berries, a hint of bergamot - and I could hear a hamster wheel spinning somewhere in the living room. A goofy little one night stand between friends, unlikely to lead anywhere because I had places to go and so did she. Who knows what could have been.
The next day was the first day of strawberry season. Nothing beats local produce. You bite into local strawberries and they're not white inside like that crap that comes from California, but blood red and dribbling juice everywhere. We were eating strawberries on the porch, dipped in cream. I could feel their juice in my hair, staining it from its normal dirty blond to bright red. Like hers was. All natural, of course.
The next day I tried to wash the stains out, but I couldn't. I could have cut my hair off, but I'd been growing it out for so long that I didn't want to start again. I tried shampoo filled with noxious chemicals, and I tried my brother's Glisterine FrutoZAP (made from 80% Organic Bananas) but nothing could shift those little red marks. Not even peroxide. Disgusted, I dyed the whole lot bright red. I looked like a radish that lived in a hippie commune. It kind of worked.
Things started getting a little odder after that. Went to my usual dubious nightclub, picked up a girl. Three days later I saw her in the street with hair as red as flames. I found myself baking in my bed, throwing off layers of sheets until I was stark naked lying on top of my mattress and dripping with sweat. I found myself being afraid to go out of the house alone. Slowly I was covering the mirror in my bathroom with little post-it note doodles, little dancing people and tiny twisting diagrams in Sharpie Black.
There were twenty people with hair the same colour as mine at the nightclub next week, forming a flame-haired carrot-top radish mob of swirling twirling bodies. We never used to cater to goths, but now we were all dressed in black. My dancing was different that evening - I used to be low and slinky like the angry little boy I am, but now my arms were flying high in the air over my head like kites and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
I could see her everywhere I looked now. Every person I saw on the street reminded me of her. I'd heard of this happening to other people, but not to me - I'm a love-em and leave-em kind of guy. It frightened me.
I woke up one night, covered in sweat. Muttering under my breath, I stumbled my way over to my bathroom to pour myself a glass of water.
Standing there in the yellowing light of a sixty-watt bulb, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw her face taking over my own. I saw her staring out at me.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything other than gasp for breath and to search for some subconscious reminder of what the hell I actually was like once upon a time before I met her. Suddenly I was ill; I sprinted to the toilet and threw up a mouthful of blood. Except it wasn't blood. It was pulp. Fruity pulp.
Strawberries.
God help me.
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Date: 2010-07-07 07:39 pm (UTC)It might help to use the In-Class Oxygenator. Every so often, put your hands flat out on the table/desk in front of you and breath in deeply a few times. Helps to get oxygen to the brain and wake you up again, and also could break a stress-cycle that might be building.
That said, I have confidence that you will do fine. You were the one that was organizing the entire Community Theatre/Arts/Cool Place Building, and that should involve some felicity with finances, and hence with numbers.
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Date: 2010-07-07 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-07 10:18 pm (UTC)