We are always taught to expect everything.
In the perfect archetypal Western life, we're born in nice, suburban neighbourhoods with ever-expanding basketball hoops, bases filled with sand, bicycles unlocked in the front for the easy get-away, play dates and day camps and babysitters on speed dial. We grow up in small orange brick elementary schools, evolve into larger and less colourful middle schools where we twirl our furry pens, discover our first "real" crushes and group dating, movies with a hidden chaperon and a regular pizza place. And then high school, with a light tapping of Converse rubber soles on cool linoleum flooring and a quick wink from the janitor. This is where new friendships cement a little quicker and rip off with little more than a bittersweet spot of gooey dark gray residue.
We are always taught to expect everything.
Graduation comes, cuing the cheesy music and the nights bent over beside a friend's used red Toyota (another hand-me-down), vomiting out the last remnants of a torrid but fleeting love affair with Bacardi Breezers. And then we ship out, hours away to university, where we finally feel like living out our free and youthful innocence, befriend strangers and spend hours discussing Neitzsche over cheap diner coffee. Suddenly everyone you meet is another one-night stand, a disposable best friend, used for good conversation and tossed away the next day after empty promises - however good it was while it lasted.

The rest, of course - graduation, the dawning of the proverbial REAL WORLD, full-time job in a field that no longer seems relevant to your degree. You travel quite a bit, discover the world while you're still young and spry. You go to Vienna and try to catch a wisp of the legacy of all your heroes, drive around the South of France with other twentysomething friends, teach English in Japan. All of this, before you finally meet a man (a MAN, with an ironed shirt and perfectly tousled brown hair, nothing but pens and promises in his pocket) and settle down and move into the nice suburban neighbourhood with the basketball net out front, with the unlocked bicycles. You introduce your children to this life, more play dates and daycare. All of this until the kids turn into grown-ups, with grown-up minds and Blackberries, with their own children in the daycares and an arm around their waist, chatting eagerly about the economy and cheese and asking you for recipes.

We always expect everything.

Is it time to consider a plan B?

I'm still trying to function as a human being.

10/11/08
10:10

Thanks, asshole upstairs neighbour, for ruining the one chance of an hour of solid shut-eye this morning by pounding your latest whore into a solid heap of Barbie burger. Because, let's be honest, it's not like we both don't know MY BED IS DIRECTLY BELOW YOURS AND YOUR WINDOW IS OPEN AT ALL HOURS.

YOU FREAK.

Aside from that, my night was amazing - walking to the Old Port at 2 am with Abdullah and Dylan, rounded the circle around the downtown core, ended up at a grimy diner at 5 AM and had the most amazing eggs, sausage, and homefries in my life. Back in bed by 7:45, an hour before I had to wake up to meet my cousins and walk for the cure.

And of course, now, my legs can't move without sharp cursing pains and my eye lids are growing heavier by the pound, but the only thing I regret is not stretching.

So how are your lives?

It's been a while since I've done this

Top 10 Songs For a Rainy Morning In My Cozy, Colourful Near-Basement Apartment:

10) You've Got Growing Up To Do (Joshua Radin)
9) Apples And Pairs (Slow Club)
8) Green Eyes (Coldplay)
7) Freddie Freeloader (Miles Davis)
6) Where Did My Baby Go (John Legend)
5) House Of Cards (Radiohead)
4) Grey Room (Damien Rice)
3) Joseph and His Rabbit (Caroline Keating)
2) Sea Green, See Blue (JayMay)


I don't think I want a boyfriend, I just want someone who will bring me white daisies.

As Suggested By The Calculations Of Copernicus

This first kiss on this cold street
could have jailed Galileo
for the heavenly point it proves
but tonight, merely moves
our two souls into steady revolution
around and about the warm fixed fact
of our brilliant lips.

- Jason Guriel


I am dreaming of what every girl wants - bright red sweaters, tweed skirts, knee-high suede boots, Chanel Chance, cobble stones, and Paris in the fall.

"So Vegas, huh, people? I love your saying - What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And that is why when I leave here, I will no longer have herpes."

So I'm pretty sure the saddest moment of my life was this morning at dawn, when I was lying in my bed, very much awake and thinking about exercising. Finally, deciding to get up and go for a run, I start rummaging through my drawers for shorts and socks and the sports bra that I think my mom bought me in grade 8 --- and nada. I have no shorts. The closest thing I have to a sports bra is a normal bra that has shed its underwires in many tumbles through the dryer. All my socks are nylon. Even worse - in terms of footwear, it's a toss-up between a holey pair of pink Converse hi-tops and gold flats. I opt for the Converse, harass my mother for cotton socks and shorts (at 5:30 AM), and I'm out the door.

Walk out, jog for three blocks, stop, double over in heaving gasps, and continue walking for the next song and a half. Try to jog again, but barely make it through the first chorus. Me, flailing my arms, iPod hitting against my tree-trunk thighs, sweating out a lake, DYING. It was ridiculous. About halfway into the run, I was ready to find a nice green patch of grass and lay down in it forever. I saw elderly people speed-walking across the street with tighter buttocks than I and ultimately lost every silent race I staged with them in my head. That was how bad it was. And now, at 7:55, after drinking a gallon of water, my ass is planted to this arm chair, feeling the burn, and is not ever going to get up.

Working out is not as fun as it's cracked up to be.

Plagiarism.

Someone is waiting to swallow all the halos out of you
As your face blows through my windows
Sending pieces flying all around my room

And I love you and I want to
Shoot all the super heroes from your skies