01.25.08
Posted in Sparkle at 4:12 pm by jeci
This is another long one. Perhaps you might want to get yourself some popcorn or something first.
Resolution 2. I will not succumb to pressure—neither external nor internal, nor implied, explicit, or the product of my own paranoid imaginings—to Get a Job and Be Successful.
I suspect there will be times when this New Year’s resolution will come into conflict with New Year’s Resolution 1. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to forge ahead with both.
I have found that being honest about not wanting to work is a great way to stop a conversation. It turns out that telling people you’ve decided to take a break from the whole big career…thing is tantamount to announcing you have leprosy. People will just kind of blink at you, speechless, while trying to find a way to take an imperceptible step away from you. Because when you say, “I’ve decided the best thing for me is to not work for a while,” what people hear is “I’ve been sizing you up for the last ten minutes, trying to gauge the size of your savings account while simultaneously performing a discreet assessment of how gullible you are.”
The fact that, previous to this decision, I was employed for 17 years without break seems to have no bearing on the perception that, obviously, I am a BIG LAZY MOOCH. Entitled! Directionless! I’m not especially defensive about any of this, as I’m quite secure in the knowledge that I’m not any of those things. I do tend to bristle at it, regardless, which I suppose is natural. Although, the people who imply such things are generally people I don’t care for anyway and, if I wasn’t supplying them with such easy fodder, they would be busy finding other aspects of my character to snip away at. On the whole, I think, most people are just a little taken aback because it’s an unusual decision from which a number of taboo questions regarding my finances arise*.
All the same, I have to say that, despite whatever mild social discomfort arises from this decision, I’m incredibly proud of myself for making it. It’s the most adult—the most honest—thing I’ve ever done.
Here’s a sort of Cliff’s Notes, PG 13 version of the story: Last year, while I was in the thick of my dreadful job, I started to get sick. Not, like, cold and flu sick (although I was, at that point, rundown enough to be chronically ill in that sense). In fact, I don’t think “sick” is quite the right way to put it. It’s more like…really weird things started happening to my body. At dinner one night with my family, apropos of nothing, my vision became obscured by weird flashing lights and bright colours; for about half an hour I could barely see. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away. I get migraines, but I’d never had an aura before. In fact, I’ve yet to have an aura that produces an actual migraine, so neither I nor my health care providers were entirely confident that it was an aura.
Within a day, the aura phenomenon began to repeat itself, only with the unpleasant addition of random, wild, stabbing pains in my eye that eventually gave birth to a permanent blind spot. Within a week, my ear and the area behind the affected eye filled with fluid, causing a persistent dull throb behind my eye and sometimes causing my equilibrium to skitter out of whack. In fact, I could track the throbbing in the blind spot, which would swell in tandem with my heartbeat. By the by, if you’re an editor and you’re curious about a highly effective method of driving yourself to distraction, I’m here to tell you that a pulsing, relentless blind spot that tracks your vision across a page will do the trick.
None of this went over very well with my doctor. There are a number of things that can cause sudden, unilateral visual disturbances and almost all of them are Bad. (I’m telling you peeps, if something weird happens to the vision in one of your eyes, get thee to a doctor.) When the doctor’s office personally calls you a cab to whisk you off to the hospital for a series of expedited tests that simply can’t wait another hour, you don’t know whether to be grateful for the level of care you’re receiving or deeply disturbed by it.
Among my least favourite of the possible diagnoses was brain tumour. (See? Bad.) I don’t suppose my distaste for this possibility needs a whole lot of elaboration. At one point, during a battery of questions regarding the exact nature of my migraines and the auras (”Do your headaches get worse if you bend over?” “Yes, much”), my doctor looked up sharply and then quickly reassembled her face into passive neutrality when she saw that I saw her reaction. A tiny quiet moment passed between us. “You think it might be a brain tumour, don’t you?” I said bluntly. “I’m going to send you for a CT scan so that we can rule out the possibility of a tumour,” she replied, gathering her professionalism around her.
Ouch.
My appointment for the CT scan happened so quickly that I barely had time to work myself into a panic, except to note that, once again, I was being ushered in for tests with disconcerting efficiency and haste. Of course, we all know by now that I do not have a brain tumour, so there’s not a lot to the whole CT scan story. (Which..Sweet baby Jesus in the goddamn manger, it is not a tumour. I mean, really, anything but a tumour, right?) This was confirmed again by the neurologist to whom I was referred and by the follow-up MRI to which he sent me. (It turns out they’re quite thorough when dealing with the spectre of a brain tumour.) I won’t bore you with the entire litany of specialists I saw and tests I endured, although this anecdote is amusing. As are these pictures. (Stoopid, unnecessary eye patch!) I will, however, take the time to relay that getting tested for a brain tumour sucks. Like I said, I somehow managed to muster a certain amount of grace in the face of these tests, although I think denial played a large role in the whole thing. All the same, I managed not to panic until I was actually IN the test. That is to say that not until I was inserted into the giant roaring machine that looks and feels very much like the inside of a coffin did the rats get loose in my mind. The MRI is long and noisy and coffin-like and there it was. Brain tumour. Death.
I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t want to die. Not just because I didn’t want to leave behind my husband or my family and friends, although that certainly weighed most heavily. But I was also so miserable in my life, so dissatisfied and hurt, that I would have felt cheated. Petulant, perhaps, but true. To that point in my adult life, I had hungered for something more, and the harder I’d tried, the longer I’d extended my reach, the harder I’d fallen short.
But I wasn’t dying. The dark moment passed and faded, and although I knew it was important, I didn’t know what to do with it or about it.
In the end, it took the better part of eight months for a rotating cast of doctors to figure out what was/is wrong with me. Less than two weeks before we were scheduled to leave on our bike trip, I was peered at and poked and prodded by a team of ophthalmologists, one of whom, upon watching me all clenched and hunched in the chair began to ask me questions about stress and muscle tension. He reached out and gently but firmly squeezed a hot spot in the shoulder on the same side as my affected eye. I jumped as though he had electrocuted me, bonking my head on some of the equipment with a musical clang. “So that’s sensitive then?” he asked unnecessarily.
If they gave me the medical term for my problem, I’ve forgotten it. It doesn’t matter. The non-medical term for it is stress. Plain and simple. I’d become so tense that the muscles in my shoulder were clamping down on nerves that affect my vision. I was literally and metaphorically blinded by stress.
The whole debacle just goes to show that if you ignore the more casual symptoms of stress, the back pain, the headaches, the insomnia, the chronic illnesses, and, hell, even the crying jags to which you occasionally succumb, if you ignore all that and insist to yourself that you keep going, your body will totally make something up. Your body knows when you’ve had enough and it’ll let you know; if you ignore your own squeaky wheels, they squeak louder and louder until they get some grease.
I have to say that that bloody awful job was the best thing to happen to me. By the time I took that job, I had been functioning at an ever intensifying level of burnout for a decade. The job was terrible and extremely stressful in almost every way, and it provided a series of last-straw events that went beyond my threadbare coping skills. I went down and I went down hard. Physically and emotionally, I just fucking ate it. I maintain a heartfelt belief that I came as close as you can possibly get to having a nervous breakdown without actually needing medical intervention**. But for the fact that I was going blind, of course. Who knows how long I would have gone on half-living if it hadn’t become painfully obvious that I couldn’t pull it off any longer.
By the time I left that job and had biked my broke-down body 1000 kilometres across the Rocky Mountains I realized that I could, obviously, function quite well regardless of how intense my burnout was. We all can. Hell, we all do, at some point.
By the time I had biked the remaining 6000 kilometres and found myself gazing out over the Atlantic Ocean, I’d had, as you can imagine, a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Somewhere along the way, day after happy day of sunshine and hearty eating, night after night of easy, undisturbed sleep, the burnout began to peel away from me. I could feel it leaving my body, the stress. Some days it just seemed like the heaviness of the stress my body had been hoarding in its muscle memory would take flight like a flock of birds startled from their roost and I would suddenly feel lighter. It did not take long for me to realize that I’m much better off without stress roosting in my bones or gnawing at my gut. It did, however, take me a long time inside my head to accept that I was prepared to take the necessary steps to preserve my newfound well-being.
I never expected to take off more time from work than the three months that we had planned for the bike trip. But each day that passes, I realize I feel that much better than I did the day before. I can never get over how physically different I feel. And not just because my eye and shoulder have been slowly healing all this time. But, like I said, without the sick weight of anxiety, I feel lighter. I’m sleeping. I have a healthy appetite. I can’t believe it, but I had literally forgotten what normal felt like and, quite frankly, I’m reveling in the opportunity to enjoy it.
But, best of all, better than how physically well I’m starting to feel, each day that passes, I realize how blessed I feel, how blessed I am. I’m no longer that broken, myopic girl who felt cheated by life. I’ve been given a chance to grow into someone else (me).
I really don’t know how long my healing will take, but I feel pretty sure that, just as my body let me know that it was time to throw in the towel, it will let me know when it’s time to suit up and get back in the game. In the meantime, I’m gonna polish off this long, tall drink of happy.
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*I’m temping. Part time. This prevents me from having to mooch off of the system or anyone around me. You can get that harried, suspicious look out of your eye. Anyone looking for an extremely flexible, easy, yet relatively well-paid source of income (as in more money than you probably think, but, fairly enough, less money than most salaried career jobs) should consider temping. It’s entirely up to you whether you take a gig. And someone else finds the gigs for you, so all you have to do is answer the phone and decide if you feel like working. It’s absolutely ideal for someone suffering from burnout and/or looking to kick start a career as a freelance writer. Not that we here in the blogosphere know anyone like that.
**What I find odd is the vague sense that, socially speaking, it seems that going on medication to deal with the fact that you can’t deal with your life is deemed more acceptable than changing your life (i.e., taking a break) as necessary. To me, it seemed absurd to forge ahead on a path where anti-anxiety medication and anti-depressants were inevitable when I could take steps to create a life in which I wasn’t anxious and unhappy. Also absurd is the sense that it seems it would have been more forgivable to choose not to work if I’d actually had a nervous breakdown first, instead of just coming close and realizing that this break is what’s needed. To that I say: What-EVER, crazy, workaholic, myopic, North American society! If you wanna lumber ahead, drinking the rat-race Kool-Aid and gagging on its bat-guano aftertaste, that’s your business. Me? I’m out. Your Kool-Aid gives me the shits.
Actual happy is the best drug you can find. You do have to be careful, though, because it’s highly addictive.
NB: I’m not trying to be all Tom Cruise about this. I firmly believe that medication is an absolute saviour for some people and encourage anyone who is struggling emotionally to at least consider it. But I also firmly believe that suffering from burnout is a far cry from having a chemical imbalance.
Finally: The sweet Jack Johnson song from which I got the title of this post.
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01.24.08
Posted in Hmph at 2:31 pm by jeci
I just beat a hasty retreat from the gym in our building. And I’m miffed.
It happened while I was doing leg presses. The smell. This…very bad smell encroached upon the room and then overwhelmed it. I initially shot an accusatory look at the other woman thinking it had to be her.
(Aside: Now, I’m not usually puritanical about bodily functions but I don’t like this woman. I think of her as Grumpy Face because no matter where we cross paths she glares at me [and everyone, I'm sure]. Like, she’ll get on the elevator where I’m just, you know, standing and minding my own business and she’ll make a point of holding my gaze and glowering at me in this weirdly aggressive way. She did the same thing when she entered the gym and when I smiled in an attempt to be amicable, she made an almost inaudible “Tss!” sound and sneered. Well, slightly. But still—sneered! WTF, right? So if the dumb cow had let one rip, I had no compunction about making her squirm and was even looking forward to it a little bit. Am petty.)
But it wasn’t Grumpy Face. She was busy scowling at her iPod (which she then accidentally dropped on the treadmill, which, in turn, promptly flung the iPod against the window—ha-ha!)(Petty!).
Anyway, it turned out the smell was coming from the courtyard, which was being filled with a toxic green cloud from a chemical sprayer. And if I could smell the chemicals, that meant I was breathing them in! And, worse, my eyes and throat started burning. Jesus. Call me paranoid, but the dude doing the spraying was in a full-on hazmat suit and here we were in the gym not 10 yards away breathing that shit in. HMMMMPPPPPH!
I just think I should have a say in it if the building manager has decided to douse our home in poisons. And, seriously, it’s a prim and pruned little courtyard garden, not some huge industrial fruit orchard*. What harm would a few bugs do? It’s a concrete building, so it’s not like termites can take over or something.
Anyway, I’m not just going to huff and puff about this on my blog and snap the MacBook shut with smug, self-righteous indignation. I’ve decided to bring it up with the building manager and the strata council and have already found organic gardening services in Vancouver. Surely there’s enough of a concentration of Yaletown yuppies in this building that we could get a hearty number of signatures to Go Green if we had to!
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*Not that I condone the use of pesticides in industrial orchards either. It’s just that industrial farming stupidly lends itself to chemical applications, as opposed to a few innocent laurel bushes.
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01.18.08
Posted in Meh at 4:32 pm by jeci
Remember how I poured my heart and soul into my New Year’s writeup and then lost it* and vowed to rewrite it? Yeah, well. I’ve been putting it off. Obviously. It’s rather personal and, uh, [shuffles feet uncomfortably] painful and I’m kind of nervous about the whole thing. Since Blue Yon Belly’s grand re-opening, I’ve managed to lightly skirt around the issue of being too personal here and, in manner of a total control freak, I’ve only released old content that fits easily into my comfort zone. (I’m absurdly uncomfortable with the idea of people having the ability to peruse my old content unless I say it’s OK. What? I just acknowledged that it’s absurd.) This situation is not sustainable because, first and foremost, it’s insecure and neurotic, but also, it won’t be long before I’m just phoning it in and posting things like “Today I did the dishes.” There’s only so many superficial things to talk about in one’s life. There’s also only so many things that one can dilute with sarcasm without undermining one’s own feelings. So, in short, I’m not sure where this leaves me in terms of this blog. I’ve been trying to find a way to sum up, like, ten years of deeply painful personal history while being honest and respectful to myself, but also respectful to the people I love. NO BIG DEAL.
In the meanwhile, I thought I would open by posting my long overdue New Year’s resolutions. It’s turning into something of a Blue Yon Belly tradition for me to post my resolutions sometime around mid-January. I’m happy to report that both of my New Year’s resolutions from last year (here and here) have been, well, resolved. I have in-suite laundry now, and, of course, biking across Canada promptly and efficiently took care of any lingering inexplicable weight gain. I believe the weird weight gain was due to stress because as soon as I got transferred out of that wretched, toxic job, things began to return to normal. I’m not, by the way, someone who overeats in response to stress. Quite the opposite, in fact. So, that’s what was so WEIRD about the whole thing. I’ve heard that prolonged stress can curiously cause you to gain weight around your abdomen and that’s exactly what happened to me. Whereas, typically I could gain 100 pounds and still sport a flat stomach. I would, however, have an ass the size of a planet.
Anyway, without further ado, I give you the first of this year’s resolutions:
1. I will give myself permission to spend money on myself as needed. As a young adult, I spent the better part of a decade living in wretched, soul-eating poverty. Not just your typical “I’m a student and text books are really expensive, so I don’t think I can afford to go on the annual ski trip” type of poverty. No, I’m talking about the type of poverty where you sometimes forgo eating so that you can pay the rent; where you wash your clothes in the bath tub because you can’t afford coin laundry; where you spend half a year with one wet sock because the sole came off your left runner and the best you can do is duct tape it together. It was, in a word, traumatic.**
The whole ordeal fundamentally affected what I consider to be a necessity or what I consider to be worth spending money on. Truth be told, whether or not it’s fair, watching people just…BUY STUFF, lots and lots of STUFF, makes me itchy. And, OK, I’m going to say this because I can’t help myself: While I fully acknowledge that this is My Issue, for the sake of the environment and the poor, enslaved, third-world children who make the excess crap we’re tricked into thinking we need, I beg of you to throttle back and ask yourself if you really need something before you buy it. For example, there is not a soul on this planet who needs a TV. Or a bigger TV or a flat-screen TV. If you have that much extra money, why not occasionally give it to charity instead? Just remember that every time one of us well-to-do folks is seduced by the smooth plastic surfaces of HD technology, there’s somebody somewhere who needs food. OK? Phew! Thanks—I feel better.
But I digress.
Anyway. Suffice it to say that I have issues with spending money. Capital-I Issues. (But, again, allow me to assert that the wretched, soul-eating poverty was traumatic.) So, while I would certainly never argue that clothes aren’t one of life’s necessities, I’ve found it hard to decide as to the volume and quality of clothing it’s necessary for one to have and, therefore, what constitutes an appropriate amount of money and energy to invest in this arena.
For over a decade, I have subsisted on a clothing “diet” that’s consisted largely of items purchased second-hand, a smattering of items that I’ve received as gifts, and the occasional item that I’ve purchased on an irrational, reactionary binge and is thus tainted with buyer’s remorse. (Does the dieter ever truly enjoy the stolen piece of cake?) At this very moment, I’m wearing a holey T-shirt that my parents gave me as a Christmas gift in 1995. Really. I’m also wearing a hoodie that’s six years old and a pair of jeans that are only a year old, but are rapidly aging because they’re my only decent pair and thus spend an inordinate amount of time either on my arse or in the washing machine.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been able to pay off tens of thousands of dollars of debt while also squirreling away an equal amount of money in savings. One does not need to be a mental health professional to figure out that I’ve been fastidiously and, yes, a little obsessively going about making sure that I am safe from the bad, bad poverty that could be lurking around any corner. Oh, don’t try to tell me otherwise. I just know that mean old poverty would relish the opportunity to pounce on me and drag me back down to its ugly underworld and then force-feed me things like 25¢ packets of Raman noodles or No-Name mac and cheese made with powdered milk. GAH! (If I may be so bold, I would like to take a moment to correct Miss Scarlett: It’s not “I will never go hungry again!”; it’s “I would RATHER go hungry than eat pasty, processed starches EVER AGAIN!”)
The downshot(?) of all this is that I’ve achieved financial security while looking and, worse, feeling frumpy. Distractingly frumpy. And, with each passing month, the situation becomes more intolerable. For one thing, I’m a lot older than my wardrobe—a depressing rotation of jeans and hoodies—would have you to believe. There’s something of a gap between 22 and 32, you know? For example, no 32-year-old in her right mind can wear a belly shirt. Right? No. Just, no.
But the real issue is one of feeling good about myself. It’s not vain, needing a decent pair of jeans to feel good about myself, despite how it sounds. I’ve been willing to suffer through the deficiencies in my wardrobe lo these many years because I know that I’ve got a lot more going on than what I’m wearing on any given day. Quite frankly, I rather like me, just the way I am. However, it’s gotten to the point where my external shell does not reflect how positive I actually feel about myself. It’s just like Schnozz says here, feeling good about yourself is not something that floats down from the heavens to kiss you on the nose and sprinkle you with glittery self-esteem dust; we all have to work for it. And if dressing in tired, frumpy clothes is starting to make me feel tired and frumpy, I will not have it!
I am, therefore, committing to investing the time and energy into finding and purchasing age-appropriate, yet me-appropriate, clothes. I have a feeling this is going to be an ongoing project, as I literally have to replace almost my entire wardrobe. I told you that my shirt is from 1995, right? I also have a feeling that this is going to be fun. Not only because I get to buy pretty new things but because, if Ms. Katie—who said with grave urgency, “I can help you with that,” when I told her that I wanted to spend more money on clothes—is of any indication, I think, I THINK, I might have a few friends who are more than willing to help me achieve my goal.
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*I still haven’t received my A+ from Steve Jobs. That’s alright. I’m willing to take repayment in the form of a MacBook Air. It’s imperative to me that my technology can easily slide into an interdepartmental mailing envelope. And, yes, if it’s not obvious, I’m being ironic. I know I don’t need a MacBook Air, blah, blah, blah. I know, I know. I’m a big hypocrite and I suck.
As an aside, I find myself oddly disappointed that the MacBook Air ad features my darling Yael Naim. There was something so wide-eyed and Amélie-ish about her that is stained now with the lingering scent of sellout. Hypocritically, I was merely happy for Feist when her video clip swept the nation due to its placement in the iPod ad. Quite simply, it’s a cool video and an infectious song, and it seemed an appropriate choice for the ad and equally appropriate when everyone was curious about it. (Somehow the Yael Naim song doesn’t seem as appropriate. Possibly because MacBooks don’t have souls.) And, if I’m going to be honest, I was thrilled that a way talented, way underrated Canadian artist was getting her day in the sun.
And even more tangentially, that particular Feist song was in my head as we biked into St. John’s (”You know who you AR-RRE”), giving me a rather fond affinity for it. In fact, in moments of self doubt, I now listen to that song to remind myself that, as I completed my cross-Canada biking trip and literally bounced in my pedals with joy and pride, there was no doubt in my mind that I knew who I was.
**I feel compelled to note that the gravity of my impoverished situation oscillated seasonally, due to my ability to hold down multiple jobs in the summer months, as well as generally, for no reason other than the fact that I was born into the middle class and had parents who could lend me the occasional hand by loaning me a vehicle so that I could get to my more remote jobs and so on. I don’t kid myself that class by birthright—for lack of a better word—has a lot to do with my current station in life. I refuse to become one of those self-congratulatory jerk-offs who thinks that poor people should just “help themselves.” I know that I’m like everyone else: I am where I am because, yes, I did help myself, and I did work hard, but I also received external help, both systemic and familial. Some people are forced through the cracks and into margins that extend beyond the reach of social safety nets; middle class white girls are not typically among these people. I see this rather ugly truth as something to be deeply embarrassed by because, uncomfortable as it is, it would incredibly arrogant and entitled of me not to be grateful for being as lucky as I am. And that feels…icky. For what it’s worth, I also see this ugly truth as one that’s, for a million reasons, worth changing.
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01.13.08
Posted in Drunken Jeci! at 10:02 pm by jeci
Photo of us at an actual U2 concert courtesy of www.u2tours.com. The blue arrow is pointing to our hard-won front row location. You can tell it’s us by our Make Poverty History T-shirt hanging over the rail. I can guarantee my ribs were being crushed at this exact moment.
So last night we went to see a U2 tribute band, Elevation. Yes. Instead of going to see new bands play new music, I am now going to see fake bands re-play music from shows I have already seen. It takes a special breed of dork.
Having long been both baffled and disdainful of tribute bands, celebrity impersonators, and the like, I really didn’t think I would be going to the “Elevation tour” when I saw their ad in the paper. In fact, I may have said something along the lines of “Pbbbffft. COME ON.”
Because, you know, COME ON. I’m gonna go see someone who is not U2 pretending to be U2 and playing U2’s songs? What? THE WHOLE PREMISE IS RIDICULOUS. Who goes to these things, right?
Well, apparently, my friends do. In fact, “Elevation” received a hearty endorsement from my friends Colin and Ryan, both of whom saw the tribute show last year and provided me with convincing reasons for why fake U2 was actually pretty fun. So, alright, I was in.
Except, what does one wear to a fake U2 concert? I mean…besides me and my friends (apparently) who, exactly, goes to a fake U2 concert? What kind of a crowd would I be dealing with?
Yeah. From what I could tell, you could wear hot pants and gravity boots to see a U2 tribute band, and you’d fit right in with somebody somwhere.
Frankly, I was worried that the fake U2 crowd would be filled with people who are too old to go to actual cool, hip music gigs, and that these people would all be my age, thus confirming my suspicion that I am to old to go to actual cool, hip music gigs. And, yes, there were a number of people my age. There were also a number of people significantly older than me and significantly younger. (Although, the significantly younger crowd worried me. Please tell me that these kids didn’t just find their parents’ old U2 albums in the attic and went to the tribute band for groovy, retro kitsch factor.) There was also some significant representation from the Hell’s Angels, a group of women who looked like they were going to a disco, a power suit dude who didn’t take out his bluetooth headset all night, and a solo, middle aged man whose modest appearance was completely incongruous with his love for interpretive dance.
And then… [Cue grammatically incorrect tense change] Okay, SO. The moment the band takes to the stage, the motley crew of fans rushes to the floor and a great spectacle of dancing erupts. Headbangers, frat boys, teenagers…everybody loves fake U2! Fake Bono yells “Hellloooo VANVOOOUUVVVER!” and everyone roars back with genuine enthusiasm. Fake Bono asks how many people have seen their show before and a significant portion of the crowd cheers even louder. Kieran and I blink at each other. Fake Bono thanks everyone for coming (more cheering and yelling) and thanks the fans who flew in all the way from Calgary just to see them (more cheering and yelling). Kieran and I blink at each other again. WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH FAKE U2 THAT THEY HAVE REAL FANS WHO FLY AROUND THE COUNTRY TO SEE THEM?!?
I promptly decide that the best thing for this situation is to go on a tear, get drunk as quickly as possible, and jump into the fray. Kieran and Ryan agree with my assessment, and we spend the first set procuring and consuming drinks.
By the second set, the “Zoo TV” portion of the show, we’re each sporting a healthy buzz and we take to the dance floor. There’s simply nothing that isn’t hilarious. Fake Bono comes out in a shiny pleather Fly suit and marches around the stage to “Zoo Station.” The band has their own flashing Zoo TV images and has assembled them in a PowerPoint presentation. A dude who looks for all the world like Dog the Bounty Hunter sparks up a fatty and shares it with his midget friend. Interpretive dance guy swirls in, thrashes about, and exits stage left.
We get down to business and start yelling and singing and dancing and getting jostled and bumped by all the other people who are yelling and singing and dancing. It’s fake U2 and we get right into it. “Mysterious Ways” comes on and—I’m not embarrassed to admit it—I’m so into it, I put my belly dance lessons to use.
The band gets to “Pride” and Fake Bono holds the mic out to the crowd and everyone sings along: “Oh-ohoh-Ohh, Uh-ohoh-Ohh!” Dog the Bounty Hunter reappears and begins to dance despite the fact that he needs a cane. I decide that I love Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Things begin to wind down after that. Everyone sways to “With or Without You” and some people hold up their lighters. A couple of groups all put their arms around each other as they sing along. There’s an older couple dancing cheek to cheek and they’re clearly having a fantastic date. I decide I love them too. (On the other hand, there’s a young woman hanging out of a T-shirt that says “Hustler” who’s grinding up against a young man with disturbing, uh, accuracy and I’m about two stanzas away from hauling the two of them off the dance floor by their ears and giving them a stern lecture on manners.)
The band concludes with “Love is Blindness” and, beside me, a frat boy who has simply stood, sipping his beer for the duration of the concert, begins to discreetly perform a rehearsed dance sequence. His buddy beside him doesn’t notice. But Kieran and I do and we have to exert ourselves to avoid eye contact with each other lest we burst out laughing. I decide I love the frat boy who secretly choreographs dance routines to his favourite U2 songs too.
So, yes, the fake U2 concert…humanity at its best.
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01.10.08
Posted in Photos, The New Apartment Saga at 10:08 pm by jeci
Blue Yon Belly has moved on up to its own domain! I’ve wanted to make a move like this for quite some time and I’m rather excited about all the design potential I have with my new tools. So far, all the importing and exporting and getting things up and running took much (much, much) longer than I anticipated and, as a result, I have to settle for this simple nuts-and-bolts design for now. Because it turns out that even if you have in-suite laundry, the laundry still doesn’t do itself. I also started to get a little snakey last night because I tried to do everything at once, as I was determined that it shouldn’t take any longer than a few hours. Somehow I used this logic to trick myself into spending an entire day working on this and then went insane roughly around hour 10 of Web site upgrades when I couldn’t get my favicon to work. So, I’m forcing myself to back away for a couple of days because finally having control over the design of my blog is supposed to be fun, not self-inflicted torture. (Ah, perfectionism. It can turn any fun activity into an opportunity for self-flagellation.)
So, for now, there’s not a lot that’s new and exciting here except for a few new categories and a few old posts that I dusted off, mainly because they were photo-based and they fit nicely into the Photos category. Long-time readers will be happy to see that Drunken Jeci now has her own column (she’s bound to post new content sooner or later). And, because the domain and hosting were Christmas and birthday gifts from my husband, I’ve re-posted this little gem from our first anniversary. Because, you know, I love him.
I’ll leave you with these photos of the sunrise taken from our actual deluxe apartment in the sky. Something pretty to tide you over until I figure out how to make the blog itself pretty.
The view from the bedroom window:
And the view from the balcony:
It’s too pink isn’t it? The blog. TOO PINK. And why are some of the links invisible? Why are they also pink? Sigh. I’m so very weary of this fun blog redesign. See? I wasn’t supposed to be tinkering because I wouldn’t let it go last night and got all blustery. And yet here I am, tinkering myself to exhaustion. All but weeping over the pink. Well, it’s just gonna have to stay pink for now.
UPDATE: Simply couldn’t take the pink. But I’m done tinkering starting….nnnnnnoooooowwww.
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01.04.08
Posted in Sparkle at 2:40 pm by jeci
My best friend had her baby today! Today! Little baby A.J. That’s his name—A.J.!
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01.03.08
Posted in Hmph, Meh at 10:08 am by jeci
I wanted to post my New Year’s post in the bridge between New Year’s Day and my birthday (which is tomorrow). Having my birthday closely follow the new year is pretty cool, because I feel like I celebrate everyone else’s new year on the first and then get to ring in my own personal new year on the fourth. Anyway, I poured my heart and soul into the post because it’s one that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. I was so immersed in it, I actually broke a sweat; I was writing for three hours. I then made a huge rookie mistake: clicked Save without first copying and pasting my work into an offline doc, without first at least checking that I was still connected to the Internet. So, poof! A post about the cat snoozing in a waffle box, I back up. My heart and soul, I carelessly toss into Purgatory. I experienced an intense flare of temper, fanned my temper with its own impotence, and cursed Steve Jobs for THIS bloody nonsense that has been driving mad–MAD!–these past few weeks and which now feels personal and I hate it.
Anyway, I’m going to rewrite the damn post because it’s important to me. I hope I can bring it back to life. Certainly, if the Great Lost Term Paper Debacle of 1996 has taught me anything it’s that sometimes a whole new draft is even better the second time around AND, against all odds, I might even get the highest mark in the class. So, if my New Year’s post seems a little belated, it’s only appropriately so, since my new year doesn’t start until the fifth.
And tomorrow I’ll be twenty…SIX. Twenty-six! For the sixth time.
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