I am in an abusive relationship with a bagel.

Tim Hortons (whom I’ve partially forgiven for the Router Fiasco that was my entire life several years ago, mostly for the sake of convenience) has a Various-Cheese-and-Jalapeño-Bagel that KICKS MY ASS. I don’t know why – as half a brown person, jalapeños are not spicy to me – yet every time I eat one of these things, I find myself in a significant amount of discomfort and glee. Sure, I could just not eat them, but they are mighty delicious (if a little burny). I just wish I knew why my mouth hole finds them so very spicy, when all other jalapeños are mild like kittens dancing on my tongue. Still, the burning is much better than the alternative of “no breakfast”, as I can rarely get outside for lunch these days. I am busy. Beyond busy. Working 12 hour days busy. Burny bagels are the fuel that allow me to stagger home at night!

Ed and I are off to Victoria tomorrow, for a long (long, long, long) overdue visit to see my mother. I did a solo trip in mid-January to delivery frilly underthings, but we haven’t been over as a unit since November or so. It’s not that I don’t want to see my crazy mother, but the expense of it all – not including gas or incidentals, it costs us $165.80 for a return trip to the island – fucking gets my panties in a knot. It feels like throwing money away, and that enrages me. It’s so bad that’s actually cheaper to take the ferry between Sidney and Anacortes WA, and just drive back through the states. I was actually hoping we could do that this weekend, but I’m not the only one who’s thought of it – the reservations for the noon sailing from Sidney are full, and cars start lining up at 8am to get on that boat. If we missed the sailing, we’d be waiting until 5:55pm for the next boat and I just don’t want to do that.

The more I dwell on it, the angrier I get. I should just suck it up – get through this visit, and I’m off the hook for a little while. Plus, there’s London to look forward to. I know that’s a hundred times more expensive than going to Victoria, but it’s something *I* choose to do – it’s not an obligation, which makes all the difference in the world. Fuck obligations, unless they’re cheap and all the fun. Expensive and some of the fun is not good enough. I WANT ALL THE FUN.

Okay, enough ranting. I have many, many words to cross out and then new, better words to write down in mustard yellow. ONWARD!

A play in one act:

Ed, after delivering me a cookie (because my project document reached 100 pages and I thought I deserved one): You’ve got some make up under your eye there.
Me: *rubbing face under eye*
Ed: Nope, still there *pokes me in the face where my makeup has strayed outside the lines*
Me: *rubbing harder* ow .. maybe I’ll just go look in the mirror.
Ed: OK!
Me: *looks in mirror* *laughs wildly* *makes reference to Oscar Wilde book*

.. yeah, it wasn’t smeared makeup under my eye – they were deep, dark circles accompanied by a fine set of luggage. My “look 30 until I’m 60” Asian Card must have gone through the wash or something, because I am kind of haggard this morning. Stop looking at my portrait, people. It’s where all my sins and misdeeds go, and by exposing the picture to the light you’re aging me needlessly and I DO NOT CARE FOR IT.

I may need some sleep and several gallons of water.

It’s a well-known fact that while Apple offers free engraving on devices ordered through their online store, you’re censored in what you can have engraved – for example, they won’t do swear words or anything referencing drugs, stealing music, jailbreaking, and more. It’s not a huge deal – if you really want to have “I fuck like a cocaine pirate” engraved on your device, you can just take it to a kiosk and have it done separately. You could also try to disguise your filthy words in other languages, use hex or binary, or replace vowels with symbols (simple k-rAd speak isn’t enough – “sh1t” won’t go through but “sh!+” might) .. but that just seems like a lot of work to me.

It was far easier to just use taboo words from 17th century Scandinavia:

slat·tern   [slat-ern] noun
1. a slovenly, untidy woman or girl.
2. a slut; harlot.

Take that, censorship! Kimli: 1, Apple: all my money!

Heeee.

My Tuesday has been a Benny Hill-style comedy of errors: traffic jams, misdirections, roads that don’t go where they’re supposed to, and a pharmacist trying to kill me. I knew I was in for a bad day by the time 9:30am rolled around, but I still held out hope that the day would simmer down now and I wouldn’t find myself being chased by Keystone Cops all around my living room as a cat ran away with my bra.

Of all the stupid things that have gone wrong today, I’m most annoyed at the pharmacist who wasn’t smarter than me. I am generally a self-sufficient person; able to make enormous leaps of logic in the blink of an eye – but sometimes it’s nice to encounter people whose career path is dedicated to ensuring I don’t die in a tragic yet hilarious accident. Pharmacology is a perfect example of an area in which I expect people to be smarter than me – they’re in charge of ALL THE DRUGS, and it is not at all reassuring to me if someone in charge of ALL THE DRUGS can’t spot a glaringly obvious lapse in medicinal logic.

My one dose of cure for my crazies is made up of two pills: 150mg of sanity, and 37.5mg of sanity. This dose of 187.5mg of sanity is a bit of a pain in the ass, but one that works for me because I just have to be a special fucking snowflake at all times. It also means that instead of one prescription for one pill I take once a day, I get two prescriptions for two pills. Fine, whatever. I get my medication in 90-day doses so I don’t have to really think about it, and when I get home I dump all the pills into one container for easy popping and then I ignore it all until I can see the bottom of the pill container and put plans in motion to get more drugs.

Last night I realized I only had enough sanity for three more days, so I dug up my prescription info and pressed some magic buttons to get more. I picked up my meds today after work, and that’s when everything WENT TO HELL ALL OVER: because all my meds were in one container, I forgot that there were actually two different kinds in there and that I had two prescriptions, not one. I only refilled one, picked it up, and went on my merry way – and this is why I’m so pissed off, because it says right on the fucking bottle TAKE 187.5MG OF SANITY DAILY YOU FUCKING CRAZY PERSON. Any pharmacist smarter than me – and that should be fucking ALL OF THEM – should have noticed they were only providing me with 150mg of sanity, looked into my drug history, and seen an additional refill for the missing 37.5mg. Then they should have ASKED ME ABOUT IT, because they are my pharmacist and making sure people don’t kill themselves by taking their meds wrong is kind of their job. If they had looked and put the clues together and mentioned it to me, I would have went OH SHIT YOU ARE RIGHT PLZ REFILL THE OTHER ONE TOO I WILL WAIT THANK YOU SO MUCH I AM DUMB and then I would have went home with ALL my meds and I wouldn’t be abusing the capslock on my laptop right now.

But NO.

That DID NOT HAPPEN.

So now I have to call in the refill and go to the store again to pick up the rest of my damn meds, which will cost me way too fucking much money.

.. which is also part of the problem, because my – Ed’s, actually – benefits are fucked up thanks to his new company, and the usual 90% coverage was denied because that isn’t our drug plan any more.

Oh, and let’s not mention that to you at all until you’re at the till and your purchase comes to $150 instead of the $60 you were expecting and there’s a huge line now and you really have to pee so you’re just going to have to pay for the fucking thing and hope to hell it can be sorted out later.

GODDAMNIT PHARMACIST STOP BEING SO FUCKING USELESS

I AM ANNOYED

LOOK AT ALL THESE CAPITAL LETTERS

Also, the novelty of driving to Langley each day has worn off and I will be really glad to a) go back to taking the bus downtown to work and b) not be in Langley anymore and c) not work 12-hour days as of Thursday.

I wrote an angry letter to the store, taking them to task for not being smarter than me. I wonder if I’ll hear back from them.

I’m in Langley!

It smells like outdoors and it is hot!

Hooray for variety!

(seriously, I don’t have time to write – I’m at an off-site meeting!)

It’s been a long week around these parts. I’ve been struggling lately with a lot of deep, loomy things: self-image, the inevitable and unwelcome reality of getting older, indignent rage, the loss of self (I miss being relevant) – y’know, good time stuff. It’s left me quiet and melancholy, which I frankly don’t have time for. Summer is finally here, I’m delightfully busy at work, and planning for our London trip has started. I don’t need or want to be sad or angry, but I’m kind of both at the moment. It’s stupid. Where’s the unsubscribe button?

This pretty much sums up how I’m feeling these days:

It was a busy long weekend; one I’m not yet recovered from. I got my haircut and brows waxed on Friday, henna’d my hair on Saturday (while reading horrible books), played a lot of Diablo 3. Things were kind of lazy and pantless until Sunday, which is just how I like it (and how I’m quite seriously counting down the seconds until I can go home tonight to continue my life of pantless leisure), but eventually the siren song of the grocery store won out: I needed supplies for Heather’s birthday SBBQ. Full up of meat and gummies, we went home for a whirlwind afternoon of dip preparation before dragging Josh and Shan up a mountain later that evening: it was Canada Day, and there were fireworks to behold from far, far away:

boom

kerplowie

Not shown: 7 mosquito bites and the wicked black lung I got from the second-hand smoke. Thanks for sharing, assholes. I wasn’t there for the fresh mountain air, or anything.

Monday was the stat in lieu of Canada Day, and it was a busy one. We were supposed to be going to a SBBQ at Josh and Shan’s place, in honour of Heather’s birthday (which is today – go wish her a happy day), but the weather wasn’t playing along. Rather than move the party to a pub, I suggested we hold it at SPARTA instead. All important parties agreed, and just like that I went from spending an afternoon out to hosting 18-ish people in our house for the evening. I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, but I leapt out of bed and started cleaning. Luckily, the house wasn’t THAT bad – no matter how much Ed complains about the horrible filth we live in, it really only takes us a couple of hours to do a deep clean. We were ready for guests by 1pm, and more importantly, ready for the delivery of the secret cake:

apparently, daleks are chocolate inside

Hooray for surprises! The cake was made by Candice of Love Your Cake, and was completely delicious. Between the awesome cake and the disturbing amounts of food people brought over, everyone was stuffed into oblivion and beyond – I don’t think I want to look at another piece of meat, let alone put it in my mouth.The weekend festivities led to an extremely slow start to my morning, but the week has officially started rolling again – it helps that the week is almost half over already, thanks to the Monday off. Still, I need a great big squishy nap to sleep off all the cake I ate.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HEATHER! WE LOVE YOU!

Sleeping now.

• Number of references to penis: 56
• Number of different words used: 2
• Number of times “erection” is used: 55
• Number of times “cock” is used as a noun instead of a verb: 1
• Over three books, where “cock” appears as opposed to “erection”: Third book, in the epilogue, 96% of the way through
• Number of different references to vagina: 2 (“vagina”, 2 per books 1 and 2; “down there“, too many times to count)
• Number of times I rolled my eyes: SEVENTY MILLION

So glad I’m done with all that tripe. Back to Penthouse Forums!

As revenge for spreading the Twilight books around my social circle like a plague, Heather sent me all three 50 Shades books yesterday. I was going to ignore them, but I was struck by a sudden bout of sadomasochism – one far more real than anything remotely depicted in those books – and I dove in. I had just slopped a fresh batch of henna on my head, and was trapped in the house for at least eight hours .. how bad could the books be, anyway?

Completing the first book broke my brain entirely, resulting in the down there post below.

Then for some fucking stupid reason, I cracked open the second book around 1am. I can’t put down an unfinished book, so 5am saw me finishing the second and annoyed as all hell that these things are so popular. GOOD GOD THEY’RE BAD. I gave myself an eyeball hernia from rolling my eyes so many times. How can you possibly write a sexy times book when a) you never, whether by dirty slang or scientific terms, mention the word “penis” AT ALL, b) your sex-crazed heroine is still shocked and giggly at being touched down there (and I swear to god, the author used the exact same down there when he finally stuck a finger up her butt), the only term of endearment used throughout the book is “baby”, and it gets really creepy, and d) everything else that’s wrong with these fucking things.

I hope to god that there are no inexperienced virgins reading these books and getting their sex education from within. For starters, not all women have an orgasm during their first time (let alone more than one). For seconds, giving good head takes PRACTICE – you don’t look at your very first dick ever and suddenly you’re an idiot savant with no gag reflex. And thirds, you don’t soap someone up and THEN go to town down there – soap tastes nasty.

Oh, one more: when you’re writing a series of three scandalously depraved sex books and the only time the word “cock” comes up is as a verb – characters are constantly cocking their heads to and fro like fucking puppies – then SOMETHING IS VERY VERY WRONG.

There’s one more book to go. Depending on how much I hate myself later, I may read it this evening to get it over with (I hate not knowing what happens, even if it happens terribly).

DOWN THERE