book smart, street stupid
Okay, I love it.
(Particularly the one gentleman's flourecent pink shirt/sweater vest fashion sense. Particularily everything! Can't you just picture the treadmill-dance fitness classes that will be inspired by this? Which of course will lead to to treadmill-bellydance and treadmill-striptease-workout classes. Ah, what wonderful things could come from a simple conveyor belt.)
I'm a mess these days. Moving "home" is drawing out a lot of latent issues, bringing me to the point of nauseous panic. I've made a lot of bad decisions lately, which have put me situations I react poorly to. But I suppose the only thing to do is make getting back to Thunder Bay in one piece a priority, and not think about where, who and what I'm going home to. If I can't pull myself together, I'll find somewhere private to fall apart there - for a short time. I feel painfully detatched from almost everything at the moment, like all my motivation, passions, and desires have condensed and slipped away from me; a shadow self looking over my shoulder, but always just out of reach.
pedxing and I were walking through High Park on Sunday, and as we passed though the little zoo, the capybaras were actually out of their hut. I saw real, live capybaras! It made me way happier than it logically should have. They're just so damn cute for fifty pound rodents. As we sat and watched them through the fence, a bored looking father and small daughter walked past.
"Ugh, big rats - disgusting", the man muttered under his breath.
"Daddy, are those beavers?" asked the daughter.
"Yes."
"Actually, they're capybaras," Jay mentioned politely.
The man ignored us. We also heard the 'baras referred to as guinea pigs, and watched another man pouring a bottle of orange juice into an eager fallow deer's mouth. People are dumb when it comes to animals.
The mini-zoo also has mountain goats, llamas, yak, bison, turkey, peacocks, chicken, emu, wallaby and groundhogs. (Seeing a peacock sitting thirty feet up in a tree still looks strange to me.) High Park is about the only truly relaxing place in Toronto (that I've found anyhow), and bizarrely is the only "dry" place left in the city. This is due to a prohibition against alcohol in the will of John George Howard, the man who ceded the park to the city in 1873. Jay and I have spent some pleasant afternoons eating popsicles and reading in the grass under the oak trees there. I'll miss it.
Unfortunately, the capybaras were just another missed picture opportunity - I keep forgetting to carry the camera with me. There's always something to take a picture of in Toronto, not the least of which is the graffiti. Someone hit a billboard on Dundas close to us; we were passing by in the new car after picking up boxes for moving. I tried to convince Jay to drive around the block because I thought I might have been seeing things; I hadn't seen such a blatant billboard liberation in person before. But mostly it's the stupid little things spray painted around Queen Street West that make me laugh: "Bend it like Popcorn", or the ubiquitous "Val Kilmer wuz here".
I wish I had time to go down and check out the AIDS conference. It makes me kind of proud to know that such an important event is happening here. I wish Thunder Bay could have a bit of Toronto's cultural vibrancy and life, or that Toronto could have some of Thunder Bay's close-knit familiarity and nearby wilderness.
I heard an interview with Paul Butler today. Everytime I hear mention of him I remember how I have a big crafty crush on his collage parties. I wonder if one could be pulled off in Thunder Bay?
Unsweetened cranberry juice is absolutely nothing like the watered down, sugary cranberry 'cocktail' style juices. Much more like stomach acid.
P.S. funkypeaches, I blame you for getting me hooked on The Decemberists as of late.
(Particularly the one gentleman's flourecent pink shirt/sweater vest fashion sense. Particularily everything! Can't you just picture the treadmill-dance fitness classes that will be inspired by this? Which of course will lead to to treadmill-bellydance and treadmill-striptease-workout classes. Ah, what wonderful things could come from a simple conveyor belt.)
I'm a mess these days. Moving "home" is drawing out a lot of latent issues, bringing me to the point of nauseous panic. I've made a lot of bad decisions lately, which have put me situations I react poorly to. But I suppose the only thing to do is make getting back to Thunder Bay in one piece a priority, and not think about where, who and what I'm going home to. If I can't pull myself together, I'll find somewhere private to fall apart there - for a short time. I feel painfully detatched from almost everything at the moment, like all my motivation, passions, and desires have condensed and slipped away from me; a shadow self looking over my shoulder, but always just out of reach.
pedxing and I were walking through High Park on Sunday, and as we passed though the little zoo, the capybaras were actually out of their hut. I saw real, live capybaras! It made me way happier than it logically should have. They're just so damn cute for fifty pound rodents. As we sat and watched them through the fence, a bored looking father and small daughter walked past.
"Ugh, big rats - disgusting", the man muttered under his breath.
"Daddy, are those beavers?" asked the daughter.
"Yes."
"Actually, they're capybaras," Jay mentioned politely.
The man ignored us. We also heard the 'baras referred to as guinea pigs, and watched another man pouring a bottle of orange juice into an eager fallow deer's mouth. People are dumb when it comes to animals.
The mini-zoo also has mountain goats, llamas, yak, bison, turkey, peacocks, chicken, emu, wallaby and groundhogs. (Seeing a peacock sitting thirty feet up in a tree still looks strange to me.) High Park is about the only truly relaxing place in Toronto (that I've found anyhow), and bizarrely is the only "dry" place left in the city. This is due to a prohibition against alcohol in the will of John George Howard, the man who ceded the park to the city in 1873. Jay and I have spent some pleasant afternoons eating popsicles and reading in the grass under the oak trees there. I'll miss it.
Unfortunately, the capybaras were just another missed picture opportunity - I keep forgetting to carry the camera with me. There's always something to take a picture of in Toronto, not the least of which is the graffiti. Someone hit a billboard on Dundas close to us; we were passing by in the new car after picking up boxes for moving. I tried to convince Jay to drive around the block because I thought I might have been seeing things; I hadn't seen such a blatant billboard liberation in person before. But mostly it's the stupid little things spray painted around Queen Street West that make me laugh: "Bend it like Popcorn", or the ubiquitous "Val Kilmer wuz here".
I wish I had time to go down and check out the AIDS conference. It makes me kind of proud to know that such an important event is happening here. I wish Thunder Bay could have a bit of Toronto's cultural vibrancy and life, or that Toronto could have some of Thunder Bay's close-knit familiarity and nearby wilderness.
I heard an interview with Paul Butler today. Everytime I hear mention of him I remember how I have a big crafty crush on his collage parties. I wonder if one could be pulled off in Thunder Bay?
Unsweetened cranberry juice is absolutely nothing like the watered down, sugary cranberry 'cocktail' style juices. Much more like stomach acid.
P.S. funkypeaches, I blame you for getting me hooked on The Decemberists as of late.