Your gangsta name (first 3 letters of your first name plus 'izzle') :
Rebizzle (uh oh)

Your detective name (favourite colour & favourite animal)
Orange Bunny (terrible)

Your Star Wars name (First 3 letters of surname, first 2 letters of first name,
last 3 letters of mother's maiden name) :
Rosrerub (ack!)

Your Superhero name ( 2nd favourite colour, favourite drink)
Green Coke (!!)

Your Brazilian name (first 4 letters of first name plus 'inho') :
Rebeinho

Your Goth name (black, and the name of one of your pets) :
Black Eleanor

9. Your pornstar name (name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name):
Mittens Rubin

Wow, every single one of those was terrible!!

For those who have not, until now, been playing the home edition, a primer: every new year, I make resolutions. Then, around my birthday, which is near enough the middle of the year to be appropriate, I review those resolutions to see which ones are moving along ok, which I need to get to work on, and which turned out to be stupid ideas that need to be replaced. The idea is that this will up the odds of me actually completing these plans by year's end. Some years it works, and some... Well, you know.

So, below is what I resolved this past January 1, with a progress report in italics accompanying each:

Health vigilance -- This should be the last year I need to watch it so much. In the remaining 25 days until my surgery, I will be a model citizen of rest/nutrition/exercise/caffeine reduction/vitamin taking so as to minimize the impact of the procedure. And then I will continue those practices post-surgery so as to minimize recovery period, though taking all the time I need (I promise, Mom!) And then in May I will eat a freakin' apple.

Despite the fact that I spent the week before the surgery puking, the whole thing went swimmingly. Recovery fast and as close to painless as possible. As of last Thursday, I even had some tingles in the heretofore numb zone on the left side of my chin. Although apple eating has for mysterious reasons been postponed until July, I shall continue to be vigilant.

I will apply for grants. Just figure out the procedure and apply for everything I'm eligible for, longshot or not. All anyone can do is say yes or no, but they won't say yes if I don't apply, that's for sure.

Hey, success. I applied for two, and will soon apply for another. I even got one! I shall endeavour to recall this when I don't get others.

Devote an hour a week to current events. That's really not much to ask of myself, some people likely do an hour a day. Planet Me, while lovely, has limited vistas. CBC.ca, here I come.

Failure. Utter and complete failure. I may be a bad person.

Get a real job (haircut optional). This is not only a resolution but actually a necessity--I can maybe linger at the library until August, and maybe the school will throw me a few extra hours, but at some point in 2007 I'm going to need something more or less full-time, preferably with benefits, given my tendency to do expensive damage to myself (although...see above). Being interesting would be a bonus--starting to apply before I *need* to would up the odds on that.

I've dodged the bullet so far with this one, between both the library and the school coming through with extra hours, and #3's success. But come September, I'm still going to have to step freakin' up. Grr (sound of teeth gritting resolve).

Read lots and read joyfully. I feel a lot freer to do so since I stopped both freelance reading and course reading at the end of the summer. I started keeping a reading journal in April, so I know I've read 45 books since then, which is about a book a week, which is about right. I also resolve not to keep forcing myself to complete books I dislike/am bored by, even if they are Great Works of Literature.

Stellar. I've read lots and loved most. This was an easy one, though.

Make a blog. I aim for a semi-professional (wellllll, not really) home in May.

Hey, whadaya know!

Travel! My destinations for 2007 are New York and Ottawa, and if my brother moves there, Tokyo. This is, of course, very scary for a immobile type like myself, but when else am I going to have friends and family living in such diverse spots. To the roads I go!

Flight to NYC booked, and Ottawa trip planned. Financial constraints dictate Tokyo being a 2008 resolution, due to the marginal employment mentioned above.

Practice gratitude. I think that is a book title, but it's a good thing to do. I sure do complain about a lot of stuff, and I think with *some* validity, but others have much more (this point was driven home to me last week when I was complaining about upcoming surgery to kindly colleague, who sympathized utterly because she had had open heart surgery). I have had some really good luck and kindness extended to me this past year, and, gosh help me, expect more in 2007. I shouldn't forget how much I owe friends, mentors, family, school, employers and the universe.

Um, this one seems in retrospect a bit airy-fairy. Hard to tell how I'm really doing on it. I'll try to be more mindful.

Write a book. Oh, yeah.

Hey, I did that one too. Now I just have to rewrite it and get the thing published. No problem!


Sooo...I have a lot to do still in 2007, but for five months in I'm doing ok. Except for that whole current events thing, and the looming job problem in September. But I've got time.

I can flow with the traffic / I can drift with the drift
RR

Ok, technically, I am very bored by these what-sort-of-bramble-bush quizzes, but this one is about roses, my favourite flower! So I took it, because I am already very bored at work, and it told me I am orange, which is my favourite colour, and enthusiasm, which is my favourite emotion. So, yeah, I'm a little less bored now.

You Are an Orange Rose

You represent desire and enthusiasm Your vibe: Sexy yet familiar Falling in love with you: happens instantly - it's a fast ride

I wind up doing laundry every Thursday, and only just realized that this shouldn't be, because I have a huge wardrobe (this despite the shopping embargo over the past two years). What is the reason? Yep, you guessed it, I have only a *week's* worth of underwear!! How sad is that, especially since i hate doing laundry?? Today's to-do is buy underwear (after the laundry's finished, natch).

I could be dirty / I could be flirty
Love,
Bexy

Ok, perhaps Bexy23 will eventually fall into disuse, but for the moment there are still a few things I can't tell anyone but the inner circle. For instance--

--cheap ultra-low-rise jeans are an ill-advised purchase, especially for the active/fidgety, because they have no where to go but embarrassing if they slip even a little. And belts only weigh them down.
--I was so excited that someone other than me had started organizing a ten-year high school reunion party for my class. But I don't remember said organizers, or most of the people on the invite list, either. And I am not on the invite list myself. What can this mean?
--I still have no feeling in the right half of my lower lip, something that shouldn't really be relevant to my day-to-day life, yet is somehow driving me insane.

Thanks for listening/reading--I feel better just for telling you.

And recreate a place in my own world
Love,
bexy

Six years ago, less a month, I used the promise of getting myself a Livejournal to drag myself through the tail end of the honours thesis writing process. And now here we are, at the tail end of the masters thesis writing process, and I am rewarding myself with a blog. I went back (yet again, I do this every year) to that first post, and it is still totally relevant, although I don't use the term strange-ass anymore. To whit, one more time:

I'm going with the optimistic word here, "adventure" as opposed to "abyss" or something along those lines. And by "adventure", I mean this mad after-graduation, rest-of-our-lives thing that most of us are embarking upon. This is also, of course, the first entry in my livejournal, but I don't think by any stretch of the imagination I'm going to be able to make this thing fascinating enough to constitute an adventure. Maybe a promenade.

BUT, I'm gonna make a promise here, because I'm trying to prevent everyone (including myself) from losing interest in this little excercise in, like, week. The promise is that I'll try to at least funny or deep or interesting or weird or something in every entry. No descriptions of what I watched on TV, or recitations of arguments I had with the guy at the phone company or long pontifications on the nature of subjectivity. I promise. Well, I promise to try.

I kinda think this attempt at being interesting may eventually result in me just, well, making things up. Like, if I had a really boring day but a really exciting daydream on the bus, I think I'd rather post the exciting thing, even if its not real. I'm usually pretty convincing; people ask me if my strange-ass fiction is autobiographical all the time (it isn't, der). But, then, Lillian Hellman pretty much died bitter and penniless because she changed her autobiography to make it more interesting and Mary McCarthy made it her mission to destroy her. So maybe it's a bad idea. Well, you can *let me know*, cause you can comment on these entries. If you, you know, wanna.

You know, I'm gonna edit that slightly and go put it on the blog without annotation. It's really hard not to allude to Bexy23 over there, I think my hyper-privacy issues are making me mental. But other than that, I'm having a good time with the project, although I *still* have no friendish links. The question becomes, do I *really* need your permission to link to your blog? Ok, yes, probably.

The four-day writing vacation I took post thesis submission is now over, too--restarted the novel last night. Ahahaha. This will end in tears. In approximately 2017.

I just keep on waiting
Love,
Bexy

Well, I'm finally making the promised semi-professional blog under my real name. Nothing much going on with it yet, but it will eventually furnish links to my publications, bits of process prose, occasional excerpts and some self-aggrandizement about my rare and strange public appearances. It will also furnish a link listing of cool people I know--if you don't mind being affiliated with the real me (ie. if this blog is under *my* real name, people could likely find out yours) you can let me know and I'll put you on the list. I'm not going to link back to this LJ in any way, in a probably futile effort to keep people from finding out about the last six years of shenanigans, so if you want the new URL, I'll have to email you. Despite me making things so very difficult, I do hope you'll read the new one--I'd hate to alienate what few loyal readers I have!

Everything about it is a love song
Love,
Bexy

You know how sometimes your answering machine records a hangup so you are able to hit 5 and get the originating number. And then sometimes you will recognize it, or think you do, and be absolutely *kilt* with wondering what *that* individual could have wanted at this particular juncture, or if you even had it right at all.

And then they never ring back.

Yeah. Like that.

These small hours
Love,
Bexy

I am chewing up a storm these days and am, naturally, elated about that, but sometimes a tad too ambitious. Example occurred last night, when I decided since I have already eaten fish, rice and vegetables in their individual formats, I could manage a maki roll, and I did in fact it a few narrow ones before moving on to a California roll thicker than I can open my mouth. After conveying it via chopsticks an banging it off my teeth several times, I stared at the California roll and announced: "So we have reached detente, you and I: I can't eat you and you can't eat me." My brother chuckled and remarked, "Good to see you aren't slipping down the foodchain."

Less cheerful is being asked by my surgeon a WEEK ago, "So, have you gone back to work yet?" I said of course, and he said good for me. I said otherwise I'd starve and he was, "Oh, so you're one who *has* to work?" And where are the ones who *don't* have to work, pray?

Grr.

But, in general, yay! Healing!

When I wake up / in my make up / it's too early for that dress
Love,
Bexy

Guess who put a bowl in the microwave with a *spoon* in it. For eleven seconds, until I wanted to stir my coffee and wondered where my spoon was. So now, in addition to all the other things I have to be grateful for, I must include the fact that I am not on fire. In fact, nothing bad at all happened, which we will attribute to the beneficience of the universe, and not any conspiracy theories about metal in the microwave.

My thesis is more than 65 000 words. I have another 10 000+ that are currently on the rocks, so it may yet grow even more. Gah. So verbose, am I.

I was recently asked for a little bio, something very brief and writing related, and as I am wont to do, I started drafting it in my head on busses, etc. I quickly realized that my mind had gone down a self-indulgent, irrelevant path, but I was so intrigued that I wrote it out anyway, all 1000 words of it. A fascinating exercise, really--as much as we bloggers talk about ourselves, who do we know who has tried to tell their life story even slightly succinctly? Even more interesting is to lens your life through one current circumstance--I was trying to write the whole past 28 years as if they were all leading towards this present moment of masters thesis brilliance (Hahaha). Try it--write a version of your life dictated by one present circumstance (love life, career, location, philosophical direction) and then do another--you can make both utterly true with no overlap at all, I betcha. Watch, try reading this if you have time to kill--if you were around for the various events in questions, I bet you can recall dozens of more central events that are never mentioned!

I am from a very small southern Ontario town called LTH, just between the Hamilton escarpment and the Grand River. A perfectly nice place to live, although perhaps a bit pointless to visit. My brother and I spent our childhood reading whatever parents and teachers handed us, watching whatever came on television and playing with whatever fell into the yard (snow, spring runoff, grass clippings, green apples, toads, dirt). LTH lacked a high school so we were bussed to the next town, a poshish suburb, starting in grade nine. I’d always written stories for myself, but the high school had a newspaper and a yearbook, both of which I would write for and later edit, and a literary festival for me to enter. I won often enough to get confused about the usual probability of doing so. I was often lucky—I won second place in a city youth festival, but The Hamilton Spectator decided to run my piece instead of the winner’s because mine was shorter. I didn’t know the difference between a kids’ writing contest and a journal’s call for submissions, so I sent something to the latter and they actually took it. That seemed nice, but when the editor significantly altered the story, my little teenage ego was horrified. In retrospect, I don’t know what either of us was thinking, because in both versions of the story, someone gets eaten by an alligator. That one gets left off my credits list.
In my final year of high school, I was able to take a writing workshop (it was a very good high school). Workshopping was concept I’d not seen before, but it seemed brilliant to me. I loved hearing what others thought of my work, and trying to help them with theirs. And so the pattern was set: I loved being edited and hated being published. I moved to Montreal when I was 19 to attend McGill. After some brief confusion about how good I was at math, I pursued an honours English degree with an irrelevant but entertaining geography minor. I eventually wound up as literary editor of the arts magazine, and published some stories there and in other student publications. McGill had no creative writing courses then (I hear with envy that they do now), but in my second year, a kind and gifted prof offered a non-credit prose workshop. Everyone worked like crazy for that non-credit, and it was a fantastic group.
The following year, I took a transfer prose writing course at Concordia. There were some great minds in the class, but it was strangely embattled and ended in revolution. Since it hadn’t been an ideal experience and McGill was against fourth year transfer credits, I moved on to an informal writing group that some of my most likeminded Concordia classmates had started. It was (sigh) called “Write Club” after Chuck Palinchuk’s novel Fight Club and it was terribly masculine, despite the fact that I was not the only female in it. One of the boys wanted to be Charles Bukowski and they were always drinking absinthe. Another boy had a kitten named Chub-Chub that he kept in the hood of his jacket and even that was macho. I can’t explain it.
After I finished my honours thesis (on ironic distance in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Tom Jones), I graduated and, eventually, moved to Toronto. I started taking publishing courses at Ryerson in the evenings and being treated strangely at strange jobs during the day (a theme in my life long before and since, and one of the few autobiographical details I think is probably evident in my fiction). Finally I got a job that allowed me both school and leisure time, and I was able to write a bit more. I got to take a writing class for free at George Brown by winning a postcard story contest in which I may or may not have been the only entrant. It was the only writing class I ever took that had no workshop component, which was likely good as many of the students were crazy, but I still found it odd. I joined a few writing groups with friends, all productive but none permanent.
When I finally graduated from Ryerson, I started taking continuing studies writing classes with the University of Toronto. In one, I finally found a group of people with whom I could workshop ad infinitum (so far, so good) but by then I was realizing that I wanted to give full-bore writing at least a little chance, so I enrolled in my current program in English and Creative Writing.
In the first year, I workshopped and took courses on Virginia Woolf, Bibliography, Magical Realism, Environmental Literature and Canadian Satire. I wrote a lot and learned a lot and found another brilliant workshop group. At the end of the school year, it also occurred to me that if I wanted to be a real writer, it might be good if someone who didn’t know me personally actually read my work. It had been a long time since the alligator story, and I had had a lot of feedback in the meantime, and learned to take it manfully (womanfully?) I figured I’d be ok no matter what happened, so I sent out everything I had on my hard drive. I got many rejections—not too many to count, but I’m not counting them anyway. I also got some acceptances, five so far, which isn’t huge but is in every way enough validation to keep me going.
My mentor came on the scene last July. My portfolio got lost (never to be recovered), so he asked me to send him some stories. I sent two, and he called within the week to announce that one was great and should be published, and the other was “a mess.” The first one got published six months later, and the mess got repaired right around the same time. We’ve been working like that ever since.

Pretty funny, no? Seems totally thorough until you think: parents, brother, friends, life and loves outside of school and writing? Hell, even the jobs aren't really in there. I wonder what I could achieve if I actually *did* write to the exclusion of everything else...probably extremely poor mental health!

Life in a madhouse
Love,
Bexy

AlumLife wants to know our favourite almamater memory. What is it? I have a feeling a lot of my faves are far too idiosyncratic to be publishable--who knows what WAWA is, or wants to? Who knows the gentle side of stalking? Barrie boys? CH? The great ankle-spraining of 97? The car?

Someone who was mean to me in junior high and who I haven't spoken to since has added me as a friend on Facebook. Should I remind him of this sad fact? Let the request go unanswered? What? What? How could he have forgotten? Grrr...

Last week during the ice age, I wore my heaviest sweater to Mr. Mentor's house, and picked up quite a bit of cigarette smoke. I just washed the thing in the sink (of course it is nonmachine washable) and now the appartment wreaks of wet wool. I'd rather smoke, any day.

In other random news, This morning Winona gave me a teeny static shock, went to sleep and refused to wake up. I
thought it was all over. I spent ages on the phone with Apple Care, who, once they hear the words "electrical shock" become obsessed with the possibility of litigatable damages
("Any charring to the immediate area? To yourself?") but then the senior technicial (Brad--a prince) talked me through a return to the status quo. The whole bloody time, I was thinking to myself, "What kind of moron backs up *half* her files????" Don't be this
kind of moron!! Back up your files!

Everything glows in a place like this
Love,
Bexy

at the info desk! The head security guy was wandering around talking on his cell, which is about par, to the extent that I barely registered him. Then a kid in a giant basketball jacket standing about ten metres away on the other side of the security gate yelled over at him, "Hey! Are you following me?" and the security guy replied suavely, "Yes, yes, I am." It was a lovely James Bondish moment. The kid tried to argue some complicated set of circumstances and the security guy, in FBI suit, still on cell phone, ("He's wearing a black basketball jacket, I'm talking to him right now.") was having none of it. I hope it wasn't serious, because I was awfully entertained.

Other entertaining stuff--yesterday I waited in a long, cold boring streetcar line, too irritable even to get out my book or iPod, so instead I listened to the group in front of me. They were 19-20 year-olds, five of 'em, all Asian, Korean I think, speaking excitable, friendly, miserably stilled broken English. They all had the same accent, so presumably had the same native language but were trying so hard to practice their English, thus limiting their conversation to, "It's a good mall, Dufferin Mall. I buy my...food there. They have lots of...food." and a relatively funny story about a guy who lost his "purse" (vocab issue) with $500 in it and had it returned weeks later with the cash still inside. I know from my ESL teaching that if you can be relatively witty with almost no vocab, you are probably a genius in your native tongue, so I felt really bad for these kids wasting their Sunday afternoon on such a dull conversation when they were probably capable of so much more. The funniest thing is that four hours later when I was waiting for my return streetcar, there they were again, still chatting gamely away. Adorable!

In between, I attended my first ever theatre workshop. So fun! We played games, mainly--we were to each contribute an exercise, and many of them involved non-word articulations, lying on the floor or running around. Mine was a script about an undefined sexual taboo--good fun! Do you notice my life getting more and more like high school? I do, and i can't say I mind at all.

My first post-surgery public reading is tomorrow. I'm a little scared. I was attempting to think of a good reason for Penny to have dinner with me before hand and finally I just said, "I'll be a bundle of nerves, would you mind?" She said yes, and that it's better to be forthright about these things. I concur.

Other lunacy: a fellow writer that I've never met emailed to wish me luck. Since I'd read his very trippy and smart work, I wrote him back to say I knew he was and that his story "f'd me up" and was very cool. "F'd up" is not a term I normally us, as you well know, and I can't think what possessed me to use it then, but since I haven't heard back from him I am now convinced that I poisoned that whole non-relationship... What think you? Disaster?

Rama-lama-ding-dong
Love,
Bexy

I left my coat, hat, and boots (I'm wearing gym shoes) in my locker and am pretending it's spring and I'm footloose and unencumbered by wool whilst I write on laptop in the new and -- sorta -- improved cafeteria. I'm listening to Pandora (still genius, but now that I know what streaming bandwidth costs at home, I can only listen while on the school wireless) and semi-in-my-own-world. The gentleman at the table beside me knocked a bottle of water on poor Winona and apologized and helped me wipe it up, but the whole first part of that inaction was all messed up because I forgot to take out the earbuds in my panic (Winona is not only a sizeable portion of my material assets but all my work) so I didn't catch anything he said. He really was nice and apologietic, but I was more irritable than Ishould've been because of the editing out of part of the apology. A downside of the iPod-ization of society that one sees often on the public transit--you miss out on a lot of incidental interactions.

If it makes you happy
Love,
Bexy

Strangely delicious--who knew? Penny mentioned she'd had it and it was good, but she didn't know the recipe. She suggested I look it up, so I googled and found many recipes easily, but they were all off Low Carb websites, which were super dogmatic and scary. But worth it. Mmmm, a lot like mashed potatoes, only more interesting and (yes) healthier.

Am having an alarming couple days, as the deadline for my thesis mysteriously got pushed up a week, and then when I freaked, probably got put back where it was, but I don't know that *for a fact* because I don't have comfirmation from my department head and so I continue to worry.

It's a good thing Laurk came to town yesterday and was charming. We hung out at her swanky hotel and had drinks and snacks (ok, soup) at the bar. It was such a "hotel bar" atmosphere and apparently some men even tried to flirt with us via the nut bowl, which is just perfect, though I didn't notice at the time. It's stuff like that gets me through.

C'mon Alex / You can do it
Love,
Bexy

in my life these days is difficult to determine...the constant writing about silence? The way most foods are still really hard to eat, but twice I've managed to suck on puff pastries at social events without too much trauma? How beautiful my friend Corinna looked in her wedding dress at her reception hier soir (perhaps I'll post a picture one of these days)? How sad I am to have missed Zai's (reportedly fabulous) birthday party (boo)? All these things are in contention and the fact that I saw *Music and Lyrics* surely is not, and yet that is what I choose to talk about today.

First of all, I really wanted to see this movie and it was all that I expected it to be and more, in that it was funny enough and charming enough and all the characters were attractive and some of the songs and gags were *really really funny*. Also, when I was nominally seeing Pouty Boy, this was our planned date and when I was describing the situation to Penny, I said, "I wish I could see it with you instead," which Penny interpreted correctly as, "Not a good sign." So when I finally told PB to stop calling me ("for a while") I was delighted to offer Penny one of my free passes so I could see the film with someone truly cool.

I offer all that to explain that I enjoyed the movie tonnes, but it was still a six/ten and there were a bunch of things truly wrong with it, which I would now like to list in LJ, because this is the only appropriate forum for nitpicking about fluff movies. Thus:

--Hugh Grant looks like the most attractive man from the Bronze Age. Gorgeous, but SO OLD! I don't know how old he actually is, but he looks about 45 with a neutral expression and 85 when he grins and his face buckles like an accordian. Don't get me wrong, I dig that, but since Hollywood has put the kibosh on women aging past 29, Drew Barrymore has gone into retrograde and consequently looks about 19, making that whole relationship seem very unlikely and borderline disturbing. Although there is a cosmetic triumph in a flashback video where they somehow make HG look 19, too--possibly aided by making him very very serious for the whole video

--there is zero chemistry between the two leads. Very friendly and charming, but strictly punch-in-the-arm affectionate. There are two kisses in the film, one of which is succeeded by a morning-after shot (hope I'm not wrecking any surprises for ya!) and it is all but impossible to believe they did anything more than cuddle and steal the covers

--HG is supposed to be a deeply committed musician and therefore quite knowledgable about musicians of the past. His favourites are the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Smoky Robinson, which have nothing in common except being old enough to be classic and famous enough that teenagers in the audience might have heard of them (although I wouldn't bet on SR).

Thanks for letting me rant on. It really was a fun movie. Go see it if you like that sort of thing!

C'mon Alex / You can do it
Love,
Bexy

Note the comma, so that today is pretty because of being snowy, not fairly snowy. Grammar is *so important* in these little ways. And it is a lovely winter's day, cold and wet and white. It seems a trifle unCanadian of me not to see all precipitation as an excuse to complain, but really, my life (and commute) is far too easy for another layer of snow to put me off much. Librarying away at the moment (ie. LJ) and then off to the new cafeteria opening (it took them eight months to install television sets that broadcast the menu instead of the chalkboards that did the same thing, so I'm not expecting much). And then the gym--hooray! Ok, not really hooray, but fine.

Yesterday at dinner with Scott, I managed a whole bowl of minestrone without a) covering myself in it or b) having to spit anything out because I couldn't chew it (as often happens these days). I even ate a lima bean! Lima bean!! Obviously, I'm a little excitable today. Obviously, I am a very charming dinner companion.

Speaking of charm, I told the former Valentine not to call me every day, and now he is pouting. Still pouting is preferable to calling every day.

New ways to feel unpopular--we are witnessing the tipping point of Facebook, as Fred said so beautifully. Thus, every few weeks I do a high school graduating class search and find more and more people on the list. No one I knew well, but all people I used to say hi to at random moments, which, for the rest of Facebook seems to be sufficient. But high school social stratification still applies--I have *no* HS Facebook friends and I'm feeling very alienated and unattractive because of it. I think I might go eat lunch in the library stacks and then paint my nails with whiteout.

Ok, not really. But the tiniest tiniest bit, I care.

I'm small but I'm strong
Love,
Bexy