Dreampepper

If you've had the good fortune to see any of these, tell us how it was! We've got a lot of maybe's on our list, and a few we're deciding between, so information's appreciated.

Friday

5:00 MEET THE FILMMAKERS: TRIMPIN + PETER ESMONDE in conversation with JEAN ROUTHIER Pacific Cinémathèque

9:30 pm Trimpin: The Sound of Invention (A documentary on one of my mother's friends). "Peter Esmonde and Trimpin--with a sculpture for temporary exhibition in the Vancouver International Film Centre--will be in attendance for our Thanksgiving weekend screenings!" Vancity Theatre

Saturday

12:30 am Kimjongilia Empire Granville 7 Th 5

2:10 pm Splinters Empire Granville 7 Th 6

?? - Salt in Blood Alley

7 pm - Michael's birthday dinner

9:15 pm Will Not Stop There Empire Granville 7 Th 3 (tentative)

?? - Frank's birthday movie-night

Sunday

12:20 The Exploding Girl Empire Granville 7 Th 1 (tentative)

1:15 NFB 70th Anniversary Program Pacific Cinémathèque (tentative)

4:00 Canary Pacific Cinémathèque

6:10 Everyone Else Empire Granville 7 Th 3 (tentative)

9:15 Bluebeard Empire Granville 7 Th 2 (tentative)

9:15 Police, Adjective Empire Granville 7 Th 3 (tentative)

Monday

11:30 - Breakfast at Havana's

1:20 Mother Visa Screening Room
@ Empire Granville Th7

4:20 Nora's Will Empire Granville 7 Th 2 (tentative)

6:20 North Empire Granville 7 Th 4

8:45 Punching the Clown Empire Granville 7 Th 2 (tentative)

9:15 La Pivellina Empire Granville 7 Th 3 (tentative)

Taking in the Laundry, painted steel, 140cm x 90cm, 2009, by Barcelona sculptor Frank Plant

Went for lunch with a game designer stranger I met on the bus today. It was a bit odd, trying to be social through a mad haze of sleeplessness with someone I've never met before, but it was nice, too, to know that even when I'm this wiped out, I can introduce myself with enough panache not to be immediately written off as a vaguely hyperactive nutcase.

The last few weeks have been deliciously fun, yet exhausting and murderous. CanSec leading into the Juno's? I'm slaughtered, especially given as nothing's let up. My planned sleepy Sunday, for instance. Lung called at noon, and even that was too early for me to want to wake up after the crazy open bar soiree at The Lift on Saturday evening. I had to, though, to make sure I made it out to Slickety Jim's for brunch with Emerson. I would have died all over again if I had missed that. Then, banking on an energy drink to win over my four hours sleep, Lung and I went hiking around the Twilight filming at Whytecliff park out by Horseshoe Bay until it was time to drop me off back at Kingsway and Broadway to meet with David and Pia for a bit of birthday-ing on Main before heading over to the Batcave, a dirty whirlwind, to retrieve my hostage bikini, (a failed mission), and try to relieve Dragos of the last of the CanSec supplies, (also a fail, but less so). Given the party, I don't think I would have made it home if it weren't for a surprise ride home from Richard, for which I am so obscenely grateful I should give him a pie, (hear that Richard, a pie! E-mail me to collect!), but even so, I don't think I got to bed until somewhere around the vicinity of two or three.

Given my plans for the next few weeks, I suspect most days are going to feel like that. Busy as busy can be while still having fun. Somewhere in there, I have to cram in more work on getting my computer back up, sifting through photos, and spending time writing. Tonight, somehow, I don't seem to have plans, but mercy, I am sure by the time I get home that will have changed. It doesn't rain but it pours.

People have been trying to make plans with me for this upcoming week. This is why I'm not.
( this week only )

Would anyone like a pair of incredibly cute long haired ferrets? I would take them myself, but I'm already well on my way to being a crazy cat-lady. (I've even started leash-training mine.)

Over the knee stripy socks and stockings arrived in the mail yesterday. They are just as fun as I've always suspected such things would be. Part of my I-missed-out-on-being-a-girl stopped clamouring as soon as I put them on. Now, evidently, those particular brain cells want me to get a skirt that doesn't go down to my ankles. I am dubious. Confirmation of one suspected good idea does not guarantee another.

THREADLESS is having another ten dollar sale.

To further my angry-at-the-world, various brilliant things are happening simultaneously tonight:

7 PM: Sex Pheromone in Tears: An unusual aspect of courtship in mice. University of Tokyo biochemist Kazushige Touhara gives the 21st annual Linville-Wright lecture on advances in olfactory sciences. SFU Harbour Center. 515 W. Hastings. Free admission. Info 604-291-5100

7 PM: Hope And Fear In Black Rock City. Kryshan Randel screens his short film about one of the most spectacular, creative and inspiring and places on earth. There will be a small donation ($3-5) at the door to help pay for the licensing of music used in the film (enabling them to enter film festivals etc). The Jupiter Lounge, 1216 Davie. Reservations not required.

Later this week:

Cory Doctorow is making an appearance with his talk, The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards. The lecture is presented by the Faculty of Applied Sciences’ Leonardo Institute, a non-credit graduate program that examines the risks, uncertainties, ethics, and art of applied science.

It will be presented twice:

Thursday March 8 at 6:00pm in the Fletcher Challenge theatre at SFU Vancouver (515 West Hastings St.) Free. Seating has all been reserved.

Friday March 9 at 3:30pm at SFU Burnaby in Academic Quadrangle, C9001. Free. Arrive early to ensure a seat.

Burrow is staying with me this weekend. (She just got a new XKCD t-shirt and it being super squealy happy about it). 2 o'clock tomorrow we're going down to Suspended, Boca Del Lupo's WinterRuption show at Granville island with Nicole and Duncan.

At four, she'll be playing bike-polo at Grandview Park, and then we're going to SinCity in the evening with Wayne.

You are invited to any and all of these things. (Bike polo, obviously, requires a bicycle.)

Charity Larson's put up another lovely page of Busted Wonder.

Hands like sand falling through water, a smile too of something the same. Eyes that scratch the ceiling of shyness, colour storm-skirting the edges of decency. Laughter of coffee, small movements ducking the head away. Laughter of hiding like inside a box of perfectly warped glass. Hanging a shot to dry between the lips, watching wrist to elbow, it's recalled in an instant, the taste of soft intimacy holding hands with polished copper, the mix of colours, the white cream roses cloudily blooming in clear licorice alcohol. Lightning and thunder, the gravity hand of wind in the basement, part of later, not yet.

Pick up the gift, make the liquid vanish. Magic tricks, sleight of nothing up my sleeve. Everything will be alright. A toast to sitting here, a toast to being alive and smiling.

I joined a gamelan earlier, helped them carry heavy instruments to a waiting truck behind the Museum of Anthropology. I joined a lesbian burlesque troop the day before and scheduled the day I begin my fencing lessons.

Now Mondays are Korean Movie Night, Tuesdays are Gamelan, Wednesday will be Ghost In The Shell until we're done, Thursday have fencing, and Fridays will be the Funk-Motown night starting March 3th at the Waldorf, (the day a group of us are going to watch NightWatch on opening night, want to come?). Suddenly I'm having to peer around corners to find time for taxidermy. Unexpected, this shift of personal physics. I feel domestic, tamed.

Here's a trailer for Harry Kim's still-in-progress Dave Choe documentary.

I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven't been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I've made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light's been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.

The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that's how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn't have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.

Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It's like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don't think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.

On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of "swept off my feet". The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don't armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I'm skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I'll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can't and close instead.

It's like I should take up a hobby, but I'm already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don't work well without a modicum of input.

Speaking of hobbies, I'm finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri's freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I'm glad there's two, as I'm certain that I'll botch the first skeleton somehow. I'm considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don't want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.

Once I find how mink are to work with, I'm likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I've been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.

This is going to be a busy time. Likely good, all things considered. I require some distraction, lest I find myself bitter.

Tonight is Indie Movie Night at Sara's house.
Tomorrow night, Antonio & Mimi are having a slumber party.
Saturday is Jenn's Hallowe'en Birthday Bash.
Sunday is Sukkot, which takes me firmly out of the picture.
Monday is Korean Movie Night.

So Tuesday then. Is anyone interested in going to see the Wallace & Gromit film, Curse of the Were Rabbit, on Tuesday?

On an entirely unrelated note. I have a bit of curiosity to throw at you all. You're an incredibly diverse group of people, and perhaps perfect for this sort of query. My recent sense of wrongdoing has to do with some fairly basic ettiquite, I thought, but he's claiming that it's all in my head.

So, the question posed:
If you're in a casual sexual relationship with someone, it's only right and proper to inform them before you take another partner, no? Otherwise you're being rude to the point of possiblly endangering them, right? This is my assumption, and the assumption of everyone I know, minus the one, so I want to know, are we just an exceptional group of people or are we an aberration of some kind?

Last week I was continually busy to the point where today feels strange because I have no plans. It's like the week starts with Mondays now, for Korean Movie Night, and then everything unfolds from there. Last Tuesday was Beth's lovely concert, where I met Edward and Ethan's sister, Tiki, then Wednesday was the Brickyard with Chris, Dominique, Alicia, Ryan, Tristan and Aaron, then Thursday was open mic poetry at Cafe Du Soliex with Amber, Friday was Lung's photography opening, (where I also met wonderful people), and picking up Scott from the airport for Saturday's Zombiewalk, which was insanely delightful. Sunday was dropping him back at the airport and Steve's birthday BBQ, where I'm not sure I met anyone, (not enough to get names, at any rate), though I was the last to leave and that rolled right back over into being Monday again.

This week is shockingly empty so far in comparison. I'm going to post a schedule in grand Andrew tradition and go from there, slotting in people and events as they're planned.
( weekly keep track )

I'm feeling like I don't need to keep myself as occupied either, like the dark clouds in my mind have begun dissapating in rain and distraction isn't as paramount for survival.