Five hundred of my new little friends

I've discovered the greatest pet. They're very quiet, take up no room, and you don't have to clean up after them...because they really enjoy crawling around in their own shit. Worms are my new best friends. I got the little darlings through City Farmers, and subsidized by the city of Vancouver, so I only had to pay $25 for the worms, their bedding, their box, a book, tools, and an hour-long class on the wonders of appartment composting. It's quite exciting. I feed them my garbage and they make me wonderful, nutrient-rich compost for my garden-to-be. Sounds like a great deal to me. Plus they reproduce like rabbits....or like worms actually. Goin' fishin'? Need some bait. I've got plenty.

Why doesn't everyone have worms? They eat your garbage people! That's all they ask from you. Garbage. Come on. You're just going to through it away anyway. Get yourself some worms and some tomato plants. Or pot plants. It's the perfect system. The only tough part is names. I have at least five hundred new pets to name. I guess I could give them all the same name. I like Waldorf.

Adventure at any age

There's something incredibly comforting about getting older. You get to that age...your kids have left home, your career is secure, you've sold your family home and your life gets so much more simple. It's at that time that you want to pack a few ginormous suitcases and head off to Taiwan for a year or so.

Yes, once the sole territory of the university graduate with their single moldy backpack, people with actual luggage are taking the plunge and putting their domestic lives on hold to teach English overseas. Kinda makes you think, eh?

I'm in my mid-twenties. I graduated from university an eon or so ago. I know that I should be flying to Taiwan or Korea or, god forbid, Japan to teach hyperactive children to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, but I don't really want to. Not now anyway. I don't have time. I'm just getting things together, and the getting's pretty good. I want the adventure, but I can't go now! It would be ridiculous. I have a cat! By the time she made it through quarantine it would be time to come home already. But this is the time to go isn't. Before you start your career. Before you have kids. Before you get too old.

Thanks to my parents, I am no longer under this delusion. My dad just celebrated his fiftieth birthday. We had a party at the Keg. It was a birthday celebration as well as a going-away shindig. A week later I was helping them fit all their belongings into three oversized suitcases, and a few undersized ones. The destination? Taiwan. The goal? To teach hyperactive children to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb. My parents are my heroes. They prove that you're never to old. Never to old to sell you house and couch-surf for the summer. Never too old to take a break from your career to try something new. And they prove, to me anyway, that you don't have to do the whole ESL thing right out of university.

Whew! I can relax.

Abstinence is cool!

There is some pretty scary stuff on the net these days. As I've been spending the majority of my recovery-from-ankle-injury time (a.k.a. bored-out-of-my-gourd time) finding random sites through StumbleUpon, I randomly stumbled upon this frightening site today. Apparently, they don't have a federally-funded sex education program in the States (not surprising), but they do have a federally-funded abstinence-only program that passes stereotypes and myths off as facts. Take the Prof. Bush sex education quiz here.

We're fighting for our freedom

What a week! What a couple of weeks! I never thought I'd ever see people getting behind teachers like they have this month. I guess people just needed an issue to rally around and teachers getting fucked repeatedly in the ass is that issue.

I've been on the picket lines. Have you? There's really no other place where you can learn so much about basically everything. If you want to learn what this is all about, go down to the line. If you want to learn about solidarity, go down to the line. And if you want to know what it's like to really be a worker, then go down to the line. And bring some sandwiches why don't you.

Alternatively, go to a rally. Walk off your job. We haven't been this close to a general strike in a long time. Last year didn't even come close compared to now. Why is this important? Look. Whether your workplace is organized or not the teachers' strike is a precedent case. If a government can take away one union's right to fair and unfettered collective bargaining then you better believe they'll try it again. And when you want to start up a union drive in your place of work and your boss goes to the government and whines and says it's making him sad you know what side they're coming down on. None of us have any delusions that the cards are institutionally stacked against us (the non-bosses), but that doesn't mean we sit down and die. It means we fight every chance we get, and we fight alongside other people when they get the chance because these are the people that are gonna be fighting beside us. This is what solidarity looks like.

It's hard for any of us to pick up and head out to Alberta on a whim, but I think we should all know what's going on there. UFCW 401 (I think, it could be 407) are on strike at a meat packing plant/slaughterhouse. The first few days their employer (the American corporation Tyson Foods) tried to force busloads of scab workers through the picket line (a major no-no), but were unable to get through because of the rather pissed off people who were standing there. The employer (after or before running the union president off the road and nearly killing him) went whinning to the government who deemed that meat-packing is an essential service and legislated the company's right to continue opperations with scab labour. We're going backwards, we really are.

They make the rules up as they go along, to protect their class interests to the bitter end. I see no problem in breaking these arbitrary rules in order to protect our class interests. We're in this together. An injury to one is an injury to all.

On Friday, October 21st a whole bunch of us work-skippers will be out in full force at the PNE fairgrounds at 11:00am. Bring your megaphone.

It's a mad, mad world

I met a crazy lady today. A very pissed off crazy lady. Well, she was either a crazy lady, or one of those unfortunate individuals who, after just being released from a lifetime of captivity in a closet, find themselves completely incapable of properly interacting with fellow human beings. But I digress.

I was sitting down infront of the magazine rack at my local Superstore (yes, sitting ... You try browsing through magazines standing up with a bum foot). Anyway, I was flipping through my very secret, guilty-pleasure magazine that I only read alone, and if you ask what magazine it was I will not tell you, as it is a secret. This woman comes by in a crazylike way, and asks in a voice just brimming over with crazyosity, "Is that your basket?" Being a completely sane person, I reply in a distinctly friendly and non-crazy voice that yes it is my basket. And before I have time to blink or sneeze or do anything that doesn't require much time she crazily says, "Well move it out of my way I can't see the magazines", and she kicks my basket, kicks it mind you, out of the way.

It's my personal policy in these matters to ignore the crazy person or persons involved for my own health and safety. I could have said what was on the tip of my tongue, "Excuse me. I'm sorry you probably hear this all the time, but you are the biggest bitch I have ever met", but it wouldn't have taken much to wind this tightly wound woman up, and she seem the type that would be capable of clawing my eyes out. So I said nothing. After all, maybe I just imagined the hostility in her voice. I'm a sensitive person. I tend to do that. But then she said in that "under the breath" voice people use when they want to be heard loud and clear, "Sitting on the ground for fuck sakes. Why doesn't she just by the fucking magazine". (Again, I'm not going to tell you the title of the secret, guilty-pleasure magazine, so you might as well stop asking).

I was having one of those moments that the people on those French gag shows must get just before the camera is revealed. It's not everyday that you have someone in a Superstore lash out with such tabooed public hostility. I mean, I think this kind of stuff everyday, but it takes a certain breed of social retards to say it out loud. Two seconds later she snaps, "You're still in my way. Move or I'll get staff to remove you. That's it," she raved, not bothering to pause to take a breath. "I'm gonna get someone to move you. Fucking idiot. Just buy the magazine." And she stomped away like some stomping thing. Like I said, she was pretty wound. Like a clock you could say. Part of me wanted to stick around, and push her buttons, and smile sweetly at the worker, and say, "I was just browsing like these good people, but a grave ankle injury forces me to sit where others would stand". There isn't a jury in the country that would convict me, but I know from experience a customer service worker will do almost anything to accommodate a hysterical and deranged customer, and I wouldn't want her to think she'd won. I also I was a little afraid that if I sat around winding her up for too long she'd slap me, or die (I'm a nice person; I don't want that on my conscience. She I got up and carried on with my shopping, leaving the secret, guilty-pleasure magazine behind, which I couldn't buy anyway because of its secretness. Maybe I should have explained that to her.

The Most Evil Computer in the World

Let me tell you about the most evil computer in the world (ie. all of them). Every computer I have ever meant has been evil. They are able to perform complex tasks in the blink of an eye, but they never seem to want to do the complex task I want them to do in the blink of an eye that I specify.

As I type this anti-computerite rant on my evil computer, I know just what it's thinking in its little microchippy brain. It's thinking, "Yes, I've trapped her. She's injured and cannot run away, so she is dependent on me, all-powerful Arg (or whatever they name themselves), for all her entertainment. I'll just get her feeling all safe and comfortable by playing along for a few days, and when she's reaching the homicidal point of cabin fever BAM! no sound for her. Yes, I'll wait until she decides to watch a four-hour long movie to fill the endless hours of boredom and loneliness, and I will deprive her of sound. Moah ha ha! I am ARG! Mighty Arg!"

And so on, and so forth.

I know I will pay dearly for my complaining. Soon I'll loose the privilege of writing, and then internet, and then it will probably just have done with me and kill me. Well, you've won Arg. I am a puny human. I am no match for you. Just make it quick and painless.

No, I'm not going crazy from solitude. I am a perfectly normal shut in.

House Arrest

This is the pooiness of my life.

Trapped in the confines of the tiniest appartment in the history of appartments by a severly sprained ankle, which has ballooned to the size of a small goat. I hobble to the window and watch able-bodied people go about their lives and wish I could walk. I am at the mercy of slinky, ungrateful cat-child.

-C'mon Dru, fetch mommy the phone. C'mon baby. You can do it.

-Meoww.

-Well fine then I'll get it myself!

-Meoww.

The only good to come of all this is I've been forced to sit in one spot long enough (infront of the computer) to finally get together the motivation to start this blog. I don't know what this will lead to. Blogging is a slippery slop I hear, kind of like getting tattooes. As soon as you get the first one you start thinking about the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that. It's a gateway drug if I ever saw one. Coincidently I've decided to start three more blogs, provided I can think up three more clever titles.