I’m still reeling a little from the responses I got yesterday – thank you all so much. It wasn’t my intention to beg for validation, but you guys delivered happy thoughts in truckloads and I appreciate it more than you know. So, thank you. Y’all rock. :)

And now for ghosts. ‘nee’s text message yesterday threatening me with a haunting if I stopped writing made me start thinking about haunted text messages. Then I realized it had already been done – as well as haunted videos, haunted cameras, haunted water tanks, haunted cars, haunted eyeballs, haunted computers, haunted cat boys, haunted newspapers, haunted convenience stores .. I could spend hours researching the mostly Asian theme of haunted stuff, but I have plans this weekend and I should probably also get some work done in the meantime.

They’re running out of things to haunt – the “vengeful ghost” genre is wildly popular, but at some point you’re going to run out of things that can be haunted and then used to torture attractive college students. What then? Well, that’s where I come in. Never one to let people in need go wanting, I give you the Delicious Juice Dot List of Things that Could Maybe Be Haunted in a Movie:

• Music! You could totally haunt a CD and then when you listen to it, ghosts crawl out your EARS and then bite your head off, leaving you unable to hear the very music that caused your death in the first place. SPOOKY!
• Blog posts! “Hey, I heard about this website that has a blog post that is SO BAD/AWESOME/FILLED WITH GRAMMATICAL ERRORS that if you read it, ghosts will crawl out your EYES and then force you to re-take rudimentary linguistics until you stop abusing the apostrophe”. SCARY!
• Pregnancy tests! You pee on a stick, and instead of seeing a positive or negative result, you see .. GHOSTS! Ghosts who want revenge because they were once held captive and made to pee on a stick over and over again until they died from dehydration and now they’re back and angry at YOU!
• Facebook! A comely young lad meets a girl at a party and spends the evening talking to her. When he gets home, he tries to add her as a friend on Facebook but he can’t seem to find her (even though she told him she was on there) – an Advanced Search brings up not her profile but a remembrance group made by her friends AFTER SHE DIED!
• Dustbusters! The film opens with a comely lass in her kitchen pouring herself a bowl of cereal. Out of nowhere, a cat jumps on her counter and startles her because a) she doesn’t own a cat and b) she doesn’t own a counter. In her surprise, she spilled her cereal so she goes to her closet and pulls out a Dustbuster to clean up the mess. Instead of busting her dust though, chunks of BLOOD AND FLESH start spilling out all over her floor and cereal! Reeling back in horror, she’s terrified to note that the strange cat has now turned into SOME SORT OF HIDEOUS BEAST who pounces on her and EATS HER HEART FOR SOME REASON!
• Video games! Oh wait, they already did this one. Okay – what about a horror movie about an online game so insidious that you can’t stop playing it, eventually losing your job and friends and spouse and health and at the very end of the game (which is a plot twist because THE GAME DOESN’T END) you realize that you’ve been dead for months but no one noticed you died because all your friends left you ages ago and you’re doomed to an eternity of your level 69 half elf night orc never ever being able to attain that final ding!

Seriously, Hollywood. I have hundreds of excellent ideas. Call me, we’ll talk.

I’m very tired. Non-stop allergy attacks are keeping me up at night, so I self-medicate with extra strength Benadryl to make my skin stop crawling. Sleep is an added bonus until it’s time to get up in the morning – I still haven’t cleared my brain of the drug fog, and I’m afraid that by the time I feel awake enough to function it’ll be time for sleep again. I’m really just feeling run-down all over, which makes me worry I’m going to catch the death flu that’s going around The Lab. I’m already achy and sore of sinus – but is that just my allergies, or am I catching the avian bird sars? I don’t have time for this; I have a potato/sex farm to visit.

So, I’m tired. When I get tired, I get thinkie and down on myself. Today’s topic of introspective self-doubt: do I write too much?

It seems like I check my RSS feeds every five minutes to see if anyone has made a new post, and rarely am I fulfilled with new texty goodness. None of the other blogs I read update nearly as often as I do – I strive for at least one post a day, five days a week (and admittedly often go over my “goal”). Everyone else seems to post once a week; twice if it’s a particularly eventful week, and call it good. Am I a blog posting over achiever? Does the quality of my posts suffer because I update so often? Do I just write too damn much?

Thing is, I don’t know if I’d be happy if I updated any less.

Dear Army of Seven: would you be sad if I only wrote once or twice a week, or would you be glad that there were fewer words to wade through?

Today I am thinking about panties.

It came to pass that both Miranda and I have man crushes on a local Vancouver photographer who spoke at Northern Voice. So feverous is our ardor that to my lovely chum I stated boldly “if it were socially acceptable to throw panties during NV (and if my panties were delicate lacy twig panties) I would have totally done so” – and by gum, I meant it.

Thinking back to Gillian’s post this week about panties made me realize that panty-throwing is no longer a commonplace event. I for one think it’s high time we brought back this fanciful practice – why, how else are we to show not just mere affection but also a willingness to dispense the wanton pleasures that could be yours with little more than a nod in our direction? I say it’s time that ladies and gents of all walks of life take back the noble cause of panty-throwing and let the objects of your desire know the untold delights that await them by flinging your delicate unmentionables in their general direction whenever the opportunity presents itself. You live but once (or so) – why restrain yourself simply because it is the polite thing to do? Cast off the shackles of social acceptance and give in to your licentious ways today!

Next time La Sense has a sale, I’m buying all the trashy $2 thongs I can lay my hands on.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you a humble and broken man. Were it to come to pass that I am not a Pagan/Buddhist/anarchist with atheist leanings but rather a Jesus-humping God-fearing love-preaching hate-practicing holy roller, I would fear no hell – because I have cleaned out my fridge and lived to bring you this tale.

Solid sheets of crud. Slivers of rancid butter. Unopened milk that expired over a month ago. Yolk that exploded from frozen eggs, fossilized into a light yellow crust of unmentionable horror. Crevices that, when sprayed with a household cleanser, ejected chunks of black mystery all over my traumatized self. A jar of shriveled pickles from the dawn of time itself, suspended in frozen ancient mariner brine. Lemons that look perfectly normal but upon further inspection have clearly suffered unspeakable monstrosities and are no longer pockets of citrus delight but rather organic grenades capable of untold destruction. Applesauce so old it may well have been made from the very apples that brought about the downfall of man via Eve’s disobedient mouth. All this – and MORE – came from our refrigerator and truly, I am shaken to my very core.

I will not sleep soundly this, or any, night.

I spent a healthy part of Saturday evening in bed with an umbrella over my head.

For some reason, my friends think this is weird.

To me, it made perfect sense. I was playing DS games and cuddling with a cat or three while Ed was getting ready to go to a party. He turned the overhead light to look for his party underwear, which also turned on the ceiling fan. The fan is my #6 nemesis (we do not get along but not so much that it deserved a spot on my trading card), especially now that I am suffering from some pretty extreme allergies – the artificial wind was driving my eyeballs crazy and it was not happy good fun times for anyone involved. What to do? I could bury my head under the blankets and also suffocate, or .. hey, an umbrella. There was an umbrella on the bed. I opened it, set up camp, and never had been more comfortable.

Umbrellas in bed: not at all weird.