dreams.

was looking through my dream journal and stumbled across a few short, humorous entries. i don't remember having these dreams nearly as well as i remember having the ones in some of my longer entries, but they're pretty funny, so i'll share them:

Feb 15 09:
i'm a kid i think. big room. trains outside. special coin with g.w. bush on it, worth half a penny. i refuse to carry them.

Feb 19 09:
someone on avalanchers started talking about sexual orientation, accusing us all of being gay and into cosplay.

Feb 23 09:
i was dating some rich guy. he gave me an engagement ring but i didn't like it so i didn't want to marry him.

April 19 09:
bought salvia because [name removed] wanted to do it with me. we injected some into a turkey leg and then smoked the rest.

dreamily,

squiddy Click this.

scribblings

"Love," she said, "is the body's evolutionary response to the need for warmth. But we've taken it and turned it into something it was never meant to be."

He listened, enraptured, as he followed the smooth, gently curving line of her neck with his eyes. His gaze moved across hher face, lingering briefly on her lips before coming to rest on her eyes, which were shining with what appeared to be a burning passion for the subject that she was discussing.

She continued, "Now love is a drug that we use to sell products. It's forced upon us so that we feel obligated to marry, to devote ourselves to one person for the rest of our lives, to commit to one thing and disregard the inevitability of our changing desires. Social tradition keeps us prisoner in relationships in which only the shadow of love remains."

As he watched her, he noticed that the sparkle in her eyes was not fiery passion, but rather the faint whispers of tears that threatened at every moment and every slight shake of her head to spill over the levies of her lower eyelids and expose what she was so desperately trying to hide.

"Nothing is meant to last," she said.

And then he kissed her.

Love,

Squiddy Click this.

telemarketing, from the other side

I've just written this short essay detailing the experiences I had while working at a call centre. It could be funnier, but overall I'm pretty pleased. Click THIS to download it as a PDF file.

Also, this was written for a class, hence the use of various symbols to replace parts of the word 'fucking'.

Hope you enjoy it.

Squiddy Click this.

a portrait of the squiddy as a young girl

Despite the lack of comments on the actual blog page, the last piece of writing I put up seemed fairly well received at Avalanchers, so I've decided to upload another. This one, at over 5000 words, is quite a bit longer than the last piece. It's an autobiography that I decided to write as a series of short stories told in the present tense, because I quite enjoy making things more difficult than they need to be.

A few things I would like to mention before I put it out there:

• There are certain parts of this story that I absolutely hate. Generally, the shorter stories are not what I consider to be my best work, but since I did this for school, I was short on time and had to cut a few corners.
• There are a few stories in here that you might say are rather dark. I felt it was right to present both the good and bad parts of my life in exactly the way that I remember them. However, it would be unfair to say that I've presented a completely accurate picture of my life within these nine or so pages. Although I have presented within this work one story in particular that depicts one of the most painful and traumatic experiences of my life, that event happened six years ago. The time between then and now creates a buffer that dulls the pain enough to make it bearable to write about. There are certain wounds that are even deeper than that one, but they are too fresh to go digging through at this time. Perhaps in the distant future.
• I take comfort in my relative anonymity on the internet. I assume the only people reading this are Avalanchers and perhaps a few others. Otherwise, I wouldn't be posting this.

Now that I feel that I've sufficiently defended myself, I will present my work to you. I've put it in a PDF file that can be conveniently downloaded from MegaUpload by clicking THIS link. Or, if you prefer, you can click THIS link to download it as a Microsoft Word document. Since I consider 5000 words far too long to put on a blog page, even with a cut, the PDF and Word Doc are the only ways I'm going to have it available at this time. If anyone has trouble downloading it or something, leave a comment and we'll work something out.

With slight trepidation,

Squiddy

Edit: If you're having trouble entering the correct code on MegaUpload, try THIS. Click this.

insomnia

Okay, here's the deal: I've decided to put a few pieces of writing up on this page. Why? I don't know. Because I can.

I've spent the last half an hour or so trying to figure out the correct code so that I could use cuts in order to make the page look nicer. When I was much younger, I used Livejournal, which had a feature that allowed you to 'cut' to a plain, white page with extra text and images on it, thereby not cluttering up the main page with these things. It appears as though Blogger doesn't have this feature, so I ended up using this site's lovely little writeup. It seems to work, however it does not link to a plain, white page but rather a duplicate of the main page with only the one post on it.

Okay, I just realized that was probably confusing. Basically, the point is, I'm worried that the following may be hard for you to read because I didn't design the layout of my blog to be particularly conducive to reading long bits of text. The next piece of writing I plan on putting up is quite a bit longer than this one, so if anyone would like to give me some feedback as to whether or not this one is difficult to read, please do so. If it turns out that people are getting frustrated with the layout, I may just put the next one in a PDF file.
Anyways, on to the writing. The following is just a short musing on insomnia that I thought you may enjoy.

Comments and criticisms are welcome. Flagrant insults, not so much.

Squiddy


It is estimated that nearly half of the population is affected by insomnia at some point during their lives, but when you’re lying in a sweaty tangle of limbs and sheets at two o’clock in the morning, that statistic means absolutely nothing. You can try drinking green tea or counting sheep as they jump fences inside your mind, but when that doesn’t work, there’s nothing left to do but try to enjoy the extra eight hours you’ve been afforded. You’ll notice, as you roll over and over, trying to find a comfortable position, that there is a period of time between about midnight and four AM that doesn’t really seem to exist at all. At this point, daytime is long gone and twilight has passed, but dawn is still a long ways off. It is during this empty bit of time that the only thing that is alive is you. Even the nearly half of the population who is apparently also awake at this ungodly hour are mere figments of your sleep deprived imagination.

At this point you’ll do the first thing that everyone does when they can’t sleep: turn on the television. But at this time of night, even television sleeps. As you flip through the channels, you’ll find static, re-runs, static, pornography, more static, and terrible old films like that one in which Pierce Brosnan fights a volcano. Sometimes you’ll punch in a few digits at random and be greeted by the maniacal grin of Billy Mays, his spray-on beard becoming increasingly filled with spittle as he yells and thrusts containers of Oxy-Clean at you through your television screen. I can’t take this, you’ll think, and when you click the ‘off’ button on your remote, you’ll realize that you have no idea what to do with yourself for the next four hours or so.

Since you’ll have some time to kill, you may as well throw on a coat and go for a walk. At this time of night, and in your sleepless state of mind, you’ll observe that without any other bodies to take up reality’s natural resources, the world seems to exist more intensely than it does during the sunlight hours. That shadows colour the world in blacks and greys, and with every breath, your lungs are filled with thick and dewy night time air. You’ll perceive that silence hangs heavily in the atmosphere, broken only by the humming of streetlights as they cast their circular orange oases onto the pavement below. That there is no rain or wind, and even the weather seems to sleep. You’ll find that it is as though while you were tossing and turning, you somehow slipped through a crack in time and ended up stuck in limbo between two moments.

When you get home and settle back into bed, you’ll start to feel your limbs grow warm and heavy, and in the back of your mind you’ll acknowledge the fact that you seem to be going to sleep. It is just at this very moment, as you finally begin to succumb to the blissful haze of slumber, that you will be jarred awake by the sudden realization that never in your entire life have you ever seen a sheep jump over a fence.
Click this.

squiddy is a deadbeat blog owner

Sometimes I like to get ridiculously busy and disappear for months at a time. Deal with it. That's how I roll, baby.

York keeps emailing me. I'll be sitting at my computer, wasting time on one or many of my time-wasting websites, when all of a sudden a little box will grow out of the bottom right hand corner of my screen to inform me that I have received an email from York University. Heart pounding, I click the little box and wait with bated breath as my hotmail page loads until after what seems like hours, I am finally greeted with the words 'March Newsletter Now Online!' Yeah; thanks, York. Good of you to at least send me a newsletter while crushing my hopes with trivial emails.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sulk about how the loaf of bread I just baked turned out really poorly, how overworked I am and how much I'd like to hear back from York soon.

Exhaustedly,

Squiddy Click this.

it is important to be able to see in the shower

How many of you glasses-wearing folks out there in the vast emptiness of the interwebs have gotten into the shower onto to realize that you are still bespectacled? Seriously, this happens to me every few days.

Ocularly,

Squiddy

P.S. Sorry for the crappiness of recent blog posts. I'm in the middle of exams. Click this.

adventures in being poor

You know what's embarrassing? Trying to make a 25 dollar purchase at the grocery store and getting all the way through the check-out before realizing that you don't have any money.

I'm such a deadbeat.

Pennilessly,

Squiddy Click this.

Server Number Eight

Dear devastatingly attractive man who was my waiter at East Side Mario's tonight,

You were cute and funny and at least ten years older than me. You brought me cheese cappelletti and put extra cheese on it for me and tricked me into buying an extra chocolate milk by distracting me with your shy smile. I don't usually fall for the upsell, but I don't begrudge you for taking advantage of my obviously flustered state. You waited until a convenient time when mouths were between bites to ask how dinner was tasting, which I thought was terribly polite of you. When supper was over, I sat at the table alone while everyone else was off in the washroom. I read your name off the cheque. I still have no idea how to properly pronounce it, but I liked it because it contains the ae dipthong. You flitted by and informed me that you were just 'going to steal the cheque there'. I blushed and said 'okay' and sort of smiled into the plate of candies that was on the table in front of me. You went off to the kitchen and I thought about how nice your hair was and how blue your eyes were and how I should've written my number on the cheque.

I went home and worked some internet magic, and I found you.

I'm jealous of your boyfriend.

Wistfully,

Squiddy Click this.

to do.

I've created some lists of things that I need to get around to reading and watching. Suggestions that seem good will also be added to the lists. I'm counting on you, internet! Nternet! Ternet! Ernet! Rnet! Net! Et! T! Okay, those were supposed to be echoes, implying that nobody reads my blog. Give me a break; it's hard to express that with text.

To Read

Books
Paradise Lost - John Milton
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Vatican Cellars - Andre Gide
Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce
Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Reason - Jean Paul Sartre
2666 - Roberto Bolano
The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell

Plays
Lady Windermere's Fan - Oscar Wilde

To Watch

Movies
City Lights, Monsier Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
Blowup - Michelangelo Antonioni

Television
The Mighty Boosh
Twin Peaks

Literarily,

Squiddy Click this.

this entry is fail

I presently have zero motivation. I should be doing work. I contemplated doing work. I even sort of started doing work. Alas, I am sitting here, reading blogs, Facebooking (yeah, it's a verb now), and hoping someone interesting will come on MSN. It's a pretty typical night.

I hoped maybe blogging would provide me with something vaguely worthwhile to do. I'm finding I really have nothing of worth to say though. I'm going to go now, lest I inadvertently raise the 'whiny emo' factor of this blog to over 9000.

Despondently,

Squiddy Click this.

Try this at home, kids.

The following was overheard in my University-level grade twelve English course today. The book in question is George Orwell's '1984'.

"I don't get it."
"What page are you on?"
"Like.. sixteen."

She then went on to explain that the 'it' that she didn't get was.. well, basically everything.

In other news, I have an experiment that you should try. First, you need to obtain some of those neat glasses that you get for free at tanning salons. I'd like to mention at this point that my parents are the ones visiting the tanning booths, not me.

They look like this.

Now, put them on. Resume going about your day. Contrary to what you may believe, other people may not think that this is quite as cool as I'm sure you will once you have the goggles on. I don't recommend doing it at work unless you enjoy being ostracized more than usual. I also don't recommend doing it while driving for reasons that you'll discover once you try it.

Enjoy.

Squiddy Click this.

obligatory welcome post 2: the re-obligatory welcoming posting.

Greetings from the void.

It's 2009, and I'm starting anew. I've decided to change my focus a bit regarding the sort of material that I put up on the blog. I think I'm going to make it a bit more personal now, and sort of chronicle my slow journey toward university. When I actually get there, I intend to use this blog as my primary method of keeping everyone updated regarding what's going on with me.

So, I'll start with the definition of 'verbigeration', from The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary (okay, so I accessed it from dictionary.com):

verbigeration ver·big·er·a·tion (vər-bĭj'ə-rā'shən)
n.
Obsessive repetition of meaningless words and phrases, especially as a symptom of mental illness.

There you go.

Squiddy Click this.