Like breathing, only more important

Well, slap a post it on my back and call me an icebreaker, another year of life come and gone, and happy freaking birthday to me. It's actually being celebrated this year, with celebrities ta boot.

I squandered a few more aeroplan miles on a rental car to ride down island earlier this week to see Weird Al Yankovich live in concert; that's right, Weird Al, and I refuse to succumb to any judgments regarding taste in this matter. And just in case you forgot that you really love Weird Al too, here's a reminder of his greatness


He actually is a stellar performer, and deliberately chose to grace small, forgets-that-Canada-is-no-longer-technically-a-colony-of-Britian, botanically obsessed Victoria BC, over the let's-drive-the-homeless-into-the-sea-with-yoga-trained-man-eating-police-dogs real estate black-hole that is Vancouver. And I think he even outdid Tina with wardrobe changes. For the most part, a real live human performance is almost always enjoyable so long as the performer is genuinely into what he/she is doing, and the only live act I can ever say that I truly despised was A Simple Plans pseudo-pop-rock lip-syncing set that poisoned the water at Fuji Rock - or maybe that was just overflow from the portopotties.

After that we successfully dive-bombed that event, it was off to the fringe festival, the only occasion of the year where you can spend all day in the theatre for under 30$. One of the comic acts so enthralled me that I joined facebook so I could I friend him (friend is now officially a verb, take note Webster).

I had to banter 45 minutes with the clerk at the rental car company to get the car for the ride back up, who confessed 5 minutes into our "conversation" that he had been warned the previous night by his boss to "quit snorting coke get your goddamn life together", at which point I demanded my credit card back, which he had been holding and fidgeting with like...well, like a junkie come off of some coke, I imagine. It's always a little surprising what people will confess under the guise of being sarcastic, and I would never wish unemployment on anyone, especially drug addicts (cause they WILL get money for drugs, any way they can), but I do wish they left the finacials to a lower-risk group. If you are a drug addict reading this though, just so you know, apparently National Car Rental will take you in regardless of your habit, so long as you don't steal their clients credit card information and use it to buy smack, promise?

On the way back up, we stopped off that Parrot Sanctuary and the Wildlife Rescue Centre and saw 6 bald eagles right up close, one who's face had been shot off by a hunter but a local dentist fitted him with the world's first ever prostetic eagle beak, the whole of the parrot kingdom, 2 baby black bears, the whole of the owl kingdom (mostly abandoned after the thrill of Harry Potter abated: pets are NOT fashion, you can't throw it away after it goes out of style!), and a murder of ravens.

All and all, an awesome time was had by all. Thank Al for kicking it off real.

Rhymns with Bilfokirt

The answer is "Introvert", which I always considered a slander until one of my best friends attended a career building seminar, where everyone was subjected to extensive personality profiling to try to match their "essence" to the appropriate job sphere. One of the first categories the participants are divided up into is introvert/extrovert, followed naturally by apple/orange, vegetable/mineral, John/Yoko, rebel/alliance, replicant/replicant?

The more popular definition of introvert tend toward black and white images of hermits and fallen swordsmen who hide in caves and can't be bothered with the world because they just hate everyone. After an ex once said to me, in response to my lack of enthusiasm for going out to a smoky bar to see our friends band, that it was because I "hated friends and fun", I really thought, shit, if only I weren't an introvert...dot dot dot, even though that particular line of reasoning was terribly inaccurate, and the most ridiculously funny thing that I can remember being said to me, besides, "I'd give my law degree to see you totally naked".

See, actually introverts don't hate people at all. In fact many of them love many people, even if they may be more descriminating about it than extroverts, but according to Labour Canada's career placement test, the real difference between introverts and extroverts is that being in the company of others requires an energy expenditure for an introvert, whereas it is a source of energy for extroverts. So if you go home from a perfectly loving evening of snogging gay stippers down at the Waldorf feeling just drained, you might be an introvert! Their definition of extrovert did conjure up images of energy vampires, but who am I to judge.


They don't have to bite you on the neck to suck your energy, but they like to.


Hearing this made me feel just peachy; rather how my grandmother must have felt after she had her official diagnosis changed from "paranoid schizophrenia" to "hallucinatory bi-polar disorder".

Being anything less than completely popular is nothing to be ashamed of. God save the introvert (cause nobody else will!)

Say it, don't bidet it

My brain is collapsing under the weight of the 110 page essay I've been writing for the past 2 months, so please understand why my humour is so distinctly Mr. Cleany this evening. For lack of anything better to say, I want only to share some random T-shirt quotations that I would like to have printed onto my cotton ginnies, but that I can't imagine what company to subject to. So without further adeiu, Show me your T T's!


Ignoring the urge to defecate will complicate your life

If you love someone, let them pee

I thought that was over months ago

Bleach is for lovers

The sea: it's full of life

No Known Side-Effects

Madness Blindness

Have some integrity, use steel

People get paid to do this, don't they?

Water on the Knee -OPERATION

This game was one of my early theoretical inductions to the world of orthodox medicine, and often made me wonder why no one would come by with so plyers and pull icecream out of my head when I got brainfreeze (usually from trying to suck down an entire 1.5 litre 7-Up slurpy from the exotic out-of-town 7-11 that my family visited only twice a year).

The vast majority of the procedures listed on this a-mans body are non-surgical, but hey, where's the fun in "see if you can prescribe Levadopa without scarring the aorta on your way out".

However, water on the knee is one can be treated with a elbow grease and few cutters, and I have had it exactly twice in my life, before, and now. I have developed such a profound distrust of the medical system these days, that I was all for just stabbing myself in the back of the knee (I have a small stash of sterile syringes for just such an occasion) and sucking out all that excess synovial fluid, but everyone convinced me I'd be much better off wandering into emerg. after work and have some kind doctor do it, one no doubt with infinitely more experience stabbing+sucking inflammated joints than myself. I had that done 3 years ago when this last happened in Japan, by an weasened prune of man who must have been at least 92, and who completed the business quickly and cleanly, commenting on the water on the knee pnenomenon only as something that "happens from time to time, whatever".

Naturally I expected the same sort of results here, and 1 hour later, I was greeted by a doctor sporting a green golf tee, brown sandals and a heavy Swiss accent who asked "so would like me to drain the knee?" to which I replied, "no, I'm just here for my health", which might have been funny if I hadn't said it with so much venomous sarcasm. But in the end, I had to concede that, yes, I was there because I needed the doctor to put his unlimited access to medical supplies and knowledge of Gray's Anatomy to work, and quickly relieve me of the discomfort I had gotten myself into. However, he insisted on applying local anaethetic, which isn't actually a good sign, considering this particular operation can be performed with minimal agony to the patient. It was good that he had in the end because he jabbed the massive needle in several times at different angles under the knee cap, insisting that going through the back of the knee was somehow more "irresponsible", because there is a bunch of sensitive tissue back there - whereas the area under the knee cap is an impenetrable fortress tough as old leather, apparently. He didn't manage to get even enough synovial fluid out to drown a tick in. As we parted, he imparted to me the wisdom that there must be a reason for all that fluid in there, and to take some asprin (the Everymans Pancea!) and keep the leg elevated. At least I got a free tensor bandage out of the deal.

Henceforth, I hopped on my mighty pedalled steed, and raced home, hoping to beat the half-life of the anaesthetic, grabbed a small needle from my own stash, and did indeed stab myself in the back of my own knee cap.

What words can describe the sensation? Let me think...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOHHHH BLARGGGHMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmm...not that bad actually. I rate it just slightly above walking a few klicks on a brisk windy day after peeing your pants.

Managed to get a bit more fluid out, with no harm done, and rather less fanfare than the emergency room, with all it's blips, beeps, and ever-present whiffs of diseased human effluent. I am now a fully converted health nut wacko who will never set foot in another hospital again. I just need to learn acupuncture so that I anaesthetize myself for a little self-performed open heart surgery, should the need arise. No really, check it out: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1729344

My living room is of comparible cleanliness to any operating room, though I'm not sure which figures larger for post-operative infection, MRSA or bits of cat hair and stale tortilla chips. If we don't try, we'll never know.