Today I wrote a bit of a nasty letter and thus burned a small bridge: I can no longer hope to sell my previously loved dog cage to Miss Citronelle Canada 2007. 

Sometimes, res vita loquitur, and what it says is absurd.

Seen today on a Coffee Crisp wrapper: "It's good to know: Your good health comes from a balanced diet, proper nutrition and physical activity."

No mention of the fact that Coffee Crisp plays no part in that equation, but one can imagine the blank stares and the reply of Nestle's PR and (knowing the lawsuit-happy United States) legal people when asked about it: "What's your point?"

I guess they'd be right. 

On July 13, 2004, I wrote this here: " Environmentalists are not an interest group like lobster fishermen or black lesbians! Oh world--and Nantucket Nectars--get this through your head."

As I worked on my internship research report today, I came across The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus. One of the chapter headings is "Environmentalism as a Special Interest". This, along with various other things that have been swirling around in my mind lately, spawned It's kind of a (much) extended version of my rant against Nantucket Nectars (and the world!).

1. I don't like hierarchies - especially when I'm at the bottom of them. I walked into work this morning right behind the president of the Agency. The receptionist immediately perked up and said, "Good morning, sir! Have a great day!" As I put on a friendly grin and prepared to bask in his Highness' residual glory, the receptionist turned back to her monitor. ("No hello for you!")

2. Why is playing with magnets so damn much fun? How can I be expected to get any work done? I have thumbtack-shaped magnets in my office!

While reaching for a jaycloth in my new office, I knocked a Post-it note off the shelf behind my desk. It flitted to the floor and I bent down to pick it up. Printed on it in messy block letters, ostensibly by the office's former occupant, was a single word: "Destruction".

There are probably perfectly reasonable explanations for minor everyday, but spooky, occurrences like this, but there are also lots of easily imaginable and much more disconcerting explanations. Was my not-to-be colleague testing a new pen with the first word that came to mind? (If so, how about "Stephanie" or "flowers" next time?) Was she absent-mindedly doodling...the first word that came to mind?

Or in the unbeknownst-to-me, but let's say angering and unjust, circumstances surrounding her departure, was she programming the office to reap revenge on its next occupant? In a building where access is controlled by fancy keycards and flashing lights, anything is possible...

Dog chewed her sweater;
her anger plays piano,
mine bangs this keyboard.

Ém and I went out to our "favourite" southeast Asian restaurant (read the only one in our town) last Thursday evening. It was a sweet, warm, but not sultry summer evening. I had one week left of school and very little work remaining. Sitting on the streetside terrasse, we had a bottle of rosé whose label spoke of Balzac's back-alley trysts in nineteenth century Paris. In short, it was the springtime of our lives, and we were feeling good.

Enter the downside of living in a town peopled by rich, snooty locals and richer, snootier tourists (and young envirophilosophers who should know better but make sweeping generalizations just the same). At the table beside us was a rowdy group of thirty-somethings, and in their midst--and right beside me, as luck would have it--was about the most distasteful schmuck with whom I've had the displeasure of meeting in space and time in quite a little while.

Plaid short-sleeved shirt, capris, sandals; wavy, greasy ebony-black hair down to his chin, pushed back off his forehead by expensive-looking sunglasses; skin goldly darkened by too much time off this summer. A real plastic Adonis and, at first, a seemingly harmless bon vivant with one too many glasses of wine in his belly and a few too many loud and forced jokes gushing forth from him like jellybeans from a broken quarter-candy machine.

Then he got cheeky, fresh, and a variety of other adjectives with which the 1950s, I imagine, left us. At the receiving end of his increasingly inappropriate comments was the sixteen-year-old waitress and daughter of Chez Linthip's owner--a tiny, shy and efficient Thai girl who speaks very good but heavily accented and high-pitched English and French. At first, she was simply included in the widening aura of tipsy joshing. Then Plastic Adonis put his hand on the waitress' leg for a second (according to Ém, who had a better view) and asked if she would accompany his group home if they were too drunk: "We have a convertible; we're rich." Finally, as the waitress reeled off the list of desserts, the bomb dropped.

"Can you repeat those, but without an accent this time?" That's when I twisted around in my chair and stared the guy down. Ém managed to convince me to focus on my rosé and Pad Mie rather than on the fist-sized hole on PA's schnoz waiting to be filled. And so here I am a week later, venting the last of my rage through a delightfully peaceful channel, but wondering to what extent, if any, assholes like PA thwart our chances as a species of evolving toward higher planes, new horizons.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Here's something I wrote this morning during a break from reading about the indirect radiactive forcing effects of pulses of tropospheric ozone precursors. That's not philosphy, and what may follows may not be good poetry, but people and lives change, right?

---------------------------

"Through time darkly"

There are moments that change lives
and lives that change moments, and we ride the
neutral escalator, unrepentant, to heaven
not knowing which is which.

But when a rainy morning forces
the universe out of the director's chair,
molds and hammers it into mirrors and windows
along the escalator steps,
can you see the moment and the life, the point and the line,
in each other's mesmerized stare?

Can you see the four boys, 17, in St-Henri,
dragging heavy toqued heads, bleary eyes
and treadmill legs through industrial streets
of dark wet cemeteries and earthy, wise red brick?
Morning wanderers among morning wanderers,
looking for a magic shop and a greasy breakfast,
each scattered brain more sure of being less lost
than the next?

Silence about the night before or the years since;
only the broken images in the cracked mirror:
of normalcy and memories, sleeplessness, computer screens
and coffee; calm and measured demeanors, youthful fear
of exciting and insipid chemicals.

Just these clear brown eyes and those muddy ones;
just two identical dots and a graceful
(and for which grateful) curve, stretching seven years;
the two shimmying, dancing, untouching.

Below is an excerpt of a cbc.ca article about Prime Minister Harper's motion tabled yesterday that Quebec is "a nation within a united Canada", and Bloc Québecois leader Gilles Duceppe's motion tabled today that Quebec is a nation tout court, as we say in La Belle Province.

---------------------------

"I hope the prime minister will recognize the Quebec nation. Period," [Duceppe] said. "I hope elected officials will take a stand on the issue without any strings."

Bloc House leader Michel Gauthier added a new twist Thursday, tabling the amendment to his party's motion adding that Quebecers form a nation "actuellement au Canada" — that is currently within Canada. 

The move spawned a flurry of parliamentary gamesmanship.

Deputy Liberal leader Lucienne Robillard proposed an amendment to the amendment, adding the adjective "united" to Canada and dropping "currently" so that it would declare Quebecers form a nation "within a united Canada," virtually cloning the Tory proposal.

The Bloc agreed to add the word "united" but insisted on keeping "currently." Robillard wouldn't consent and her proposed sub-amendment died.

---------------------------

Um, no fucking kidding? It's called the sovereignty debate! This is what taxpayers are paying our Members of Parliament $140,000 for? To act out Canadian Politics 101? I mean, I realize none of these motions hold the promise or power of constitutional reform, but does anyone -- let alone the leaders of our national political parties -- really think a federalist party will rubberstamp a motion that says Quebec only happens to be in Canada right now, or that a separatist one will approve a motion that says Quebec is only a nation insofar as it's part of Canada?

I know brown-nosing Quebecers is tricky business, but didn't the sponsorship scandal suggest, among other things, that we should be given a little more credit?

I discovered on my way to work this morning that the tempo of my turn signals is exactly the same as the tempo of Shaggy's "Angel". Needless to say, I was clickin' my flashers left and right throughout the song every time there was no car close by. Thanks to living in the "country", this happened a lot.

It's a '94 Honda Accord, in case anyone ever has a chance to confirm my discovery.

This is an excerpt (of an excerpt) of Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations. It hints at things you won't understand if you don't know a little about McKenna, but I post it here nevertheless because I think that as a self-contained capsule, it remains pretty mind-blowing. I came across it as I was thinking about something else McKenna said--that humans can only evolve as quickly as our metaphors, because language is, almost literally, the very stuff that shapes and fuels us as a species.

Pretty neat stuff.

(I would italicize if I cared enough to learn how to)
-------------------------

I suspect that when we inspect the structure of our own deep unconscious we will make the unexpected discovery that we are ordered on the same principle as the larger universe in which we arose. This notion, surprising at first, quickly comes to be seen as obvious, natural, and inevitable.

The analogy that explains how this might be so is provided by looking at sand dunes. The interesting thing about such dunes is that they bear a resemblance to the force that created them, wind. It is as if each grain of sand were a bit inside the memory of a natural computer. The wind is the input that arranges the grains of sand so that they become a lower-dimensional template of a higher-dimensional phenomenon, in this case the wind. There is nothing magical about this, and it does not seem mysterious to us: wind, a pressure that is variable over time, creates a rippled dune, which is a structure regularly variable in space. In my thinking, the genes of organisms are grains of sand arranged by the ebb and flow of the winds of time. Naturally, then, organisms bear the imprint of the inherent variables in the temporal medium in which they arose. DNA is the blank slate upon which the changing temporal variables have had their sequence and relative differences recorded. Any technique that saw into the energetic relationships within a living organism, such as yoga or the use of psychedelic plants, would also give a deep insight concerning the variable nature of time. The King Wen sequence of the I Ching is the product of this kind of insight.

Human culture is a curve of expanding potentiality. In our own tormented century it has reached vertical gain. Human beings threaten every species on the planet. We have stockpiled radioactive materials everywhere, and every species on earth can feel this. The planet when viewed as a sentient entity can react to this kind of pressure. It is three billion years old, and it has many options.

Dualistic talk about humanity not being part of the natural order is foolish. We could not have arisen unless we served a purpose that fit into the planetary ecology. It is not clear what our purpose is, but it seems to have to do with our enormous research instruments. And crises! By stockpiling atomic weapons, we have claimed the capacity to destroy the earth like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple. Why? We do not know why. Surely not for the political and social reasons that are given. We are simply a tool-building species that is itself the tool of a planetary ecology that is a higher intelligence. It knows what the dangers and limits on the cosmic scale are and it is furiously organizing life to both preserve and transform itself.

My story is a peculiar one. It is hard to know what to make of it. The notion of some kind of fantastically complicated visionary revelation that happens to put one at the very center of the action is a symptom of mental illness. This theory does that, and yet so does immediate experience, and so do the ontologies of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. My theory may be clinically pathological, but unlike these religious systems, I have enough humor to realize it. It is important to appreciate the intrinsic comedy of privileged knowledge. It is also important to have recourse to the scientific method whenever appropriate. Most scientific theories can be disproven in the calm confines of the laboratory, evolution to the contrary.

Scribbled this this morning while sitting in The Record's drab excuse for a conference room, after having called the three Claude Veilleuxs in the phone book for a story my editor wants me to write--and getting nowhere.

It's the first thing anywhere near a poem I've written in a few months. Oh, if only I were alone, frustrated, and sad all the time, my creative writing career could really take off...

----------------

Who are you, Claude?


I want to produce
Japanese art (serene, squiggly, subtle)
or sell clementines to
schoolchildren from a gray and knotted
hemlock kiosk with tin roof
and matching, overhanging silver maple tree
filtering pools of sunlight and
drops of rain like Christmas tree lights.

No more prying,
or stewing under fluorescents,
watching the cloud of barking dogs,
city dust and white concrete numb my
vision.

Okay, I know for a first post in several weeks, this is overbearingly lame. But...I kind of like it, and the creative juices have been stewing but not bubbling lately.


My Personality

Neuroticism	60
Extraversion	52
Openness To Experience	59
Agreeableness	96
Conscientiousness	79

Test Yourself Compare Yourself View Full Report MySpace Surveys, Discount Ugg Boots and MySpace Layouts by Pulseware Survey Software

So there I was, sitting next to my dad at our favourite cozy jazz club (where every-BODY knows our names...) in his tiny tourist town, sipping white wine (me) and diet sprite (him), swaying to the drums, piano, stand-up bass, electric guitar, and xylophone, when it came to me: the long-awaited theory on fan-artist relationships.

One of the main reasons we're enamoured by our favourite stars is that it's as though they exist on a separate, higher plane of reality than we do. They have something--talent, charisma, looks, or simply and completely, that aura of glam and success--we don't, and we worship them (sometimes subtly and sophisticatedly, sure) for it. At the same time, though, what really revs our engines is when we can chip away at the glass wall separating our levels of existence. For many, the stray electron that bonds the molecule of giddy fandom is the fleeting moment of CONTACT: the autograph, the front-row seat to an electrified concert, or the lopsided grin that suggests, almost imperceptibly, that "hey, he's only human, just like me."

We can take that one step further, then, I realized that grooving evening at the 'I'. More specifically, I realized it as I zeroed in on J.F. the drummer and an interesting thing happened. He was faithfully keeping the beat, then Michael started playing two pianos at once and the xylophonist broke out the violin bows, and J.F. broke out into a smile. And then, as he watched, dazed, his bandmates kick it up a notch, the bemused smile turned into an all-out childish laugh. He was saying, "this is nuts, and I'm every bit as aware of it as you are, and I'm fucking loving it!"

In short, we're taken in by bells and whistles, by perfection and distance; but what keeps us coming back is direct and meaningful contact.

And then, as the pounding, rasping bass seemed to replace the blood in my veins, and the gentle whining of violin bows on xylophone keys kept me grounded, I stretched it one step further.

What about friends, I thought? Isn't the same thing happening? Aren't we drawn toward people in whom we see some little bit of perfection, something we lack? But then, as the attraction becomes an actual friendship, the twin sparkles of perfection cancel each other out, and the relationship blooms on equal ground, out of orbit of idolatry.

It's all simple chemistry.

My half-baked theory on fan-artist relationships (and to a lesser extent, all relationships)--why we like some and love others--is coming soon. First, though, if you feel like it you may read I wrote last year. It's useful background because I was grooving to the sounds of the subject of the article when I developed the theory.
I hope you enjoy!

Two questions for today:

First, if you need a little smooth and lithe osmosis to look inside yourself, is there anything much more inspiring than a rainy Friday?

Second, what the hell is the difference between "mostly cloudy" and "partly sunny"? It's not as if the position of the sun relative to the clouds stays static on any given day such that meteorologists could tell us when we won't be able to see the sun through the gaps in cloud cover. Is the answer, then, that meteorologists - in time free of squinting up at the mysteries the sky holds and making outrageous attempts to subject the tangled mess to their faulty sixth sense - have developed a useful nomenclature (an inside joke, as it were) whereby "partly sunny" means more sun than "partly cloudy", or vice-versa?

Any thoughts?

On Monday, I'll be in a new apartment with a new roommate (who is obviously something other than a roommate, we concurred last night) in a new town in a new office with a new editor (almost). It's like a new session at summer camp, where I get to choose a new set of activities, except that set constitutes what is essentially my entire life for an undefined stretch of time.

Oh, a third question: Should I apply to a philosophy masters' program for 2007-2008?

And finally, speaking of weather (it's called stream-of-consciousness, for the uninitiated), yesteday here in the Eastern Townships was a hell of a rollercoaster; a real realignment, if you think astrologically, which I don't. There was, as Emy pointed out, a heaviness upon everyone, and, I would add, everything - not an oppressive one, but a dense, efficient, natural and wet one. It was the kind of day when the confused clouds didn't want to go away but couldn't muster any darkness so just glowed yellow and shimmered behind a veil of some kind of meteorological propane.

A rainbow shot straight up, and I drove through a rainstorm in thirty seconds at 120 kilometres per hour. I bet that's a metaphor for something.

Mini-poll #2:

When you wash your hands, are you often too lazy to find the right mixture of hot and cold, so instead you just turn on the hot and wash your hands quickly before they get scalded? Because I do.

March 16 was International Photojournal Day, which, I'm pretty sure, was invented by my friend, and, in a sense (but also in another sense, not at all), hero, Matt. (Re-read that sentence: 8 commas! But I think it works, don't you?) You can see his photojournal ( here )

Matt is a real go-getter when it comes to updating his website and using technology to magical effect; I am not, and so, although the Day was March 16, I did my photojournal March 17, and now, several days later, I'm making it available to the public at-large (many of whom, I'm sure, were experiencing heightened feelings of anxiety and subtle increases in blood pressure and decreases in appetite since March 16 on account of the stress of not knowing whether I would post a photojournal). Additionally (Has anyone read Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer?), you'll notice that the entries for 3, 4, 5, and 6 p.m. are rotated at a 90 degree angle to the viewer--unless, of course, the viewer suffers from an unfortunate illness that precludes her head from being in anything but a VERY uncomfortable position. I would very much like all the photos to be oriented properly, but it turns out that this isn't realistic, so I'm over it. Really. I'm not mad.


1 p.m.


At 1 p.m., when I--hepped up on coffee and thoughts of the weekend--spontaneously, and to my colleague Maurice's subtly expressed bewilderment, decided to keep a photojournal, I was at work (if I were not at work, my colleague wouldn't have been sitting across from me, because, although we like each other a lot, we don't really socialize outside of work). I work as a reporter for The Record and Brome County News in the Eastern Townships. I share an office that is really more like an attic, with huge pine slabs for floor boards and putty around unfinished windows (well, the windows themselves are finished, but you get the point). In this picture you can see Maurice (he's 38 and has a four-year-old daughter named Emma; he likes fixing things, being a father, and reminiscing about when he wasn't a father, rode a motorcycle, and had hair halfway down his back), and, if you have REALLY good eyesight, the first two lines of a fascinating story I was writing about a dépanneur robbery.


2 p.m.


You guessed it! At 2 p.m. I was still at work; but don't think for all that that time had simply stood still between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., because it didn't. Lots happened. To prove it, we have here a shot of more of my laptop screen than was in the previous photo (as well as a stack of steno pads in the corner, which I thought dovetailed nicely with the "I'm at work" theme I was working with at this point). On it, you can see a picture of two pretty cute kids with two pretty cute lambs. This was sent to me by a nice American expatriate who operates a hobby farm with her husband and two (pretty cute) kids. Their sheep, Belle, gave birth to a "litter" of four lambs, which some of you might know is A LOT of lambs. Usually, sheep give birth to one or two lambs at a time. As is usually the case when there are more than two offspring, Belle rejected the additional babies. After a harrowing rescue, and three weeks of feeding the rejects special formula, everyone is happy and healthy. And when you work for Brome County News, that, my friend, is NEWS!


3 p.m.


In this first of four wrongly-oriented photos, we see Alison, the secretary of the Knowlton office and the woman responsible for laying out Brome County News. Alison is in her early fifties, she is married to a very friendly and curly-haired construction worker in his early forties, she has a good-looking border collie named Buddy (whom she brought to work for the first time earlier last week), and she is, bar none, THE most chipper person you'll ever meet (if you ever meet her). For this reason, she's universally well-liked, except that over the long-term her sugar sweet lilt with clients hits the fine line between amusing and sickening. In the background is Alison's workspace, where you see her iMac being splashed by the mid-afternoon white sun hanging over the pond behind the office (more on quaintness below).


4 p.m.


By this point, I was sick of the "I'm at work" theme, so I (reasonably enough) decided to leave work. On my way out, I snapped a shot of the quaint (read: deteriorating-but-from-a-safe-distance-you-can't-tell) building that houses our offices. The building is located at the top of a quaint hill overlooking the quaint village that survives off rich summer tourists, and in the winter looks and feels like a deserted movie set but for the perpetual stream of locals in and out of the grocery store and the perfume factory. In fact, as I write this, I could, if I had felt like it even a little bit, be at a meeting of the Knowlton Business Development Group, whose mission is to ensure that the town remains quaint enough to attract its members' lifeblood (retired lawyers from B.C. who drive Volvo station wagons and Mercedes SUVs--depending on family fortune and career success--I'm looking in your direction), but not so quaint that disgruntled locals who work at the abovementioned perfume factory, or the duck farm (Brome Lake Ducks--we're world-famous!), can no longer afford the necessities of life and decide to roll on down the 104 toward a cheaper, if not better, life.

5 p.m.


I feel I should note at this time that I've been informed that all the photos are in fact right-side up. And well they should be, although they still don't appear to be on my computer, and I've now devoted a considerable amount of time, effort, and text to discussing their faulty orientation. But on with the show:

At 5 p.m. I found myself at the gym with my young friend Simon. We have been pumping iron together for six months now, and I like to think I'm a mentor to the little fellow; the big brother he never had. Although he doesn't admit it, I think he likes to think so, too--when he's not making fun of me for being English, vegetarian, and Jewish. So anyway, on March 17, we actually had to renew our subscription to said gym, and I snapped this shot while our nice and perfectly bilingual friend Kim was busy getting forms, which they apparently keep in an awkardly-placed box at hedgehog-eye-level.


6 p.m.


Since it was Friday evening, we cut our workout short. There were, after all, as you'll see below ("le suspense est terrible!"), breathtakingly exhilarating things ahead on this weekend eve. And besides, as is obvious from a cursory glance at this photo, the gym had already had its maximum effect on the girth of our biceps. It was time to head home.

7 p.m.


I can't pinpoint the exact moment I got OLD, but what I can tell you is that Friday evenings spent eating late and moderately elegant suppers with Émilie and my mom, washed down with entirely reasonable amounts of $13 red wine, have become the norm, not the exception. I remember vividly Friday night family suppers where my mom would ask one of us why we were eating so little, and my brother would reply, "probably because they don't want to eat too much before drinking; at least that's my reason" (actually, this only happened once, but it fit well here, and don't think that just because I'm using the first-person, this is non-fiction). At any rate, I can assure you, as can the photos below ("le suspense est..."--oh wait, I've already used that), that these wine glasses you see were not part of any pre-drinking scheme or other such shenanigans.


8 p.m.


I'm not goine to lie to you (this must be getting confusing!). At 8 p.m., we were still at the table. I think we were polishing off the last off the wine and eating cookies; as per usual. But at a few minutes after eight, Crazy Cousin Connie (CCC) called, and who answered the phone but yours truly. Now I think I may have broken a photojournal rule by including a photo taken by someone else, but I hope that given the extenuating circumstances, you'll forgive me. Because you see, CCC--who is actually my mom's cousin--is, as her name implies, CRAZY. Well, not actually crazy; I mean she's remarkably intelligent and mentally stable, and we love her almost as much as life itself, but she has a long list of eccentricities. One is that every time I see her, her hair is perfectly coiffed, she's wearing a few pounds of makeup, a new dress, and heels that would cause a small child to hit her head on door frames. Another is that when she calls, she CALLS. A Connie conversation hasn't clocked in at under 30 minutes in recent memory: hence this less than exciting photo. On the bright side, isn't it weird to see pictures of left-handed people? Don't we look upside down, or inside out, or something?

9 p.m.


After the exhaustion of learning about Connie's imminent trip to Jamaica (it's cheaper than Cuba and the hotels are snazzier, apparently), we decided a quiet evening was in order. Initially, the plan was to watch a few episodes of Les Mystérieuses Cités D'Or, a French-Japanese-Hebrew cartoon from the 1980s about three young kids who fight off murderous Spaniards trying to use their special skills and powers to find the, well, mysterious cities of gold, in Peru. It's captivating, educational, and features hilarious classic Asian animation scenes.

10 p.m.


But that's not what happened. Instead, and for no particular reason, we decided to steal Émilie's Nintendo 64, rent games, and make a good old-fashioned evenin' out of it. Seen here is an artsy shot of the N64 controls and cables. I should mention that while at the video store (we rented Smash Brothers, Stars Wars Racing, and Mario Super Tennis, by the way), a guy about our age and even taller than I am (which instantly endeared me to him, for what I suspect are complex psychological reasons, or because I'm damn sick of always looking down) saw that we were renting N64 games and asked us if we hadn't moved on to X-Box and PS2 and whatnot. We kindly explained to him that we were quite familiar with such technological advances in the home gaming experience, but had decided to return to a goodie but oldie tonight--then had a little argument as to whether the dude was making friendly chit-chat or being a little snooty (guess which I argued for?).


11 p.m.


That's not N64 at all! You may not believe this, but at 11 p.m. our evening took another unexpected turn. Émilie had been bugging me on and off for weeks to watch my Bar Mitzvah video. Up till then, I had always objected, on account of at 13, I sounded like a girl and looked like an awkward ugly person. But I finally decided it might be kind of fun, so we popped in the tape, embarrassed me, and sated her nagging desire, and then some. In this blurry shot we can see my 1990s-permed mother dancing the Hava Nagila with friends and family.

12 a.m.


By midnight we had finally gotten down to the business at hand. In fact, by this time, I had already been thoroughly beaten at Mario Party (taken from Émilie's, not rented, in case you're paying very close attention) by most of the important characters connected to the Mario empire, except for Luigi--that was me.

1 a.m.


As per Matt's example, this last shot is an auto-portrait--of me looking flabbergasted and a little scared by the very idea that I was taking a picture of myself. I include it nonetheless, because the first auto-portrait I took had me looking really drunk, and maybe intellectually challenged (not that there's anything wrong with that). In conclusion (I never was much good at conclusions), I should note that on this day, I got my hair cut for the first time since August 13. While it may look longish here, I can assure it's nothing compared to the state I had allowed it to attain (it wasn't down my back or anything--or even all that close to my shoulders--but these things are relative). For those of you who knew me in Halifax, it was even a little longer than that time I grew it like crazy in second year, until one day I cut it real short, shaved my beard to a minimum, and went to the Wardroom for early happy hour and nearly went unrecognized by my closest friends (unless no one actually liked me--despite my generally almost adequate self-esteem, in the back of my mind, I've always worried that everyone is just putting on this elaborate show and one day I'll find out no one LOVED me. I suspect this fear is due to complex psychological factors; or that it is part and parcel of my more general distrust of the existence of real things).