Tag: employment

here we are, like last year backward


gry garness
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I adapted too quickly to my temporary work schedule and came in an hour early today. Doubly disappointing as Nicholas and Esme are still around somewhere in Ray’s truck with him and Dominique. Lovely people for lovely weather, though here the weather is all wrong. Vancouver in November has insistently dull light as if all the particles have been sucked out. It should have been cutting and bright, warm welcome blue sky and golden patches of sun on all our sidewalks that catch the fallen leaves and transform them from crispy edged mush to blazing transports of colour. That’s how it should have been. Toronto fall, lightning storms on College street and fire falling out of the corner of the eye to scrape the street with an audible brushing of texture against texture.

Really, Nikky forgot his bag at Andrew’s and we spent out morning after Breakfast driving back and forth in light rain between Andrew’s house and work, getting keys, using them, then dropping them off, then driving me downtown. Not really what I feel like talking about.

I seem to be talking to an old best friend of mine again. There was a self imposed hiatus while I put myself together enough to be human again. I get enough phonecalls without inflicting damaged personalities on my more precious people. What I have instead today is an abiding weight. An I-didn’t-sleep-last-night-so-invariably-I-thought-of-you. I was a drawn line against the wall, one of three people in my bed. I watched the sun come up and remembered you beside me. Embedded in the palm of my hand is a photograph of pulling your hair. I have the sound of it all attached. Another beautiful moment encoded under every chipped fingernail. I’m clothed in memory, the fabric of it delicate and blind, the pattern a musical scale like the colour of my eyes meeting yours in the dark. It’s all poetical and very very sad, though you make smiling so easy. Too-easy-there-must-be-a-catch. Ah right.

Eventually there will have to be a choice. Someone will have to lay down and die. I can’t explain how much I want to write fiction worthy of this photograph.

someone outside is yelling “fuckers, don’t leave without us”

Mirrormask, Sunday, seven o’clock at Tinseltown.

And, HERE! Bloody hells, people, see? Posted proof that I have seen the singing chinese students already. Yes, you’re very kind for sending it to me. I feel appreciated. It’s delightful. I love how the one on the left moves like a warner bros. charactor. I adore the fellow behind them who ignores the entire proceedings, but please, no more. This is old for the internet, mark that time passes faster here. Please send me new things. New beauty! Like this sort of nifty or this. What about the Victory Day video by the Nazi Olson Twin Clones?

related: archie comics attempt to be period.

In every direction, people are screaming drunken syllables. Hallowe’en has hit, and delightfully so. I’m sitting in front of my computer, hearing all the crowds in thier houseparties. Imagined or real, I’m too tired to care. I should have stayed downtown, the costumed crowds were a balm to my scratched life. I felt like I could have stepped off the bus and been enveloped into the shiny masque crowds lining outside almost every club. Instead I went to a meagre house-party. The smooth story of never knowing how to celebrate meshing well with my over-all lack of positive focus. I know in reality, I would have paid cover, been unable to properly dance on my twisted ankle, and been relatively ignored by everyone present. I tend to feel affinity for the old idea of the wall-flower. A passing ship, she’s probably spoken for. I don’t drink and this adds to my apparent unnaproachable aura of being in dance clubs, excepting the cliche sleazy people. It’s slightly deadening, like bubbles of lassitude are being forcibly pushed into my bloodstream and making me dizzy.

There have been so many moments leading to nothing in particular lately. I feel like I get nothing done at work, though I am thanked for being so specially fantastic every day by at least twenty people, because of the minor war currently occuring between the manager and the owner’s panic-attack neice. There’s a dichotomy there I don’t appreciate. This place is so full of strange drama. Every time there’s something wrong, I want to whistle past it, get on with finishing the tasks at hand, but this majestic battle of thiers is eating at my life. When I’m not at work, it doesn’t effect me, but it’s constant as the stars inside the shop I’ve been spending full time hours in, and it’s killing me. I need a better place to spend my days, one with tiny ladders to climb. My happiest moments are when I’m thinking of a stolen afternoon that’s getting on too many weeks ago. The memory will be wrung of blood eventually, but until then a smile creeps into my body and I lean into the glow.

sway me now, when andrew said he saw the car, I thought something else


artist unknown
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My mind began kindly to me then slipped into exhaustion. By the time I was in bed, all my thoughts were old. I should have called up Brian and had him fetch me over. It occurred to me, he would have banished my bad percussion nightmares. What’s good for me, I’m barely doing it these days. I hold out my hands to all the people who can’t quite help, and expect the rest of me to simply deal with it, forgetting that my reserves have almost entirely been used up. I think of running through a neighborhood, I think no, that place isn’t mine anymore. I don’t have a place anymore. My second home’s been closed to me.

I ran into Bill on my way to Dominique‘s Ghost Train evening. He still doesn’t know what to do with me. Jacques says after the baby is born, he’ll be able to deal with me as a human being again. I only know I could feel his bones through his coat like he was stuffed with sticks held together with fluid grace and days that stretch too long. Scraping himself thinner. Dominique and I talked about him later. She pinned him down with one word as if he were a particularly large butterfly. Elemental, she said, and I replied, he is a forest. I’m glad she knew him, she understands. In three years, no one else had a chance.

I’m dressed as a witch today, all flowing black and glitter. Work allows me costumes this week, so I’m taking advantage of it by dressing like myself instead of a vague corporate whore approximation. Customers have been asking where to buy my out-fits, which would amuse me if they were perhaps a little more polite about it. It’s full time hours this week, because of Hallowe’en. Long shifts of not having a chance to take away sandwiches from across the street. I want to fall down at the end of it, take my shoes off and walk barefoot in some rain. I want to find myself a warm and willing partner to sip hot chocolate with and look out over our little bit of sea.

Mirrormask is playing here this weekend at TinselTown. I hear of a group trip today at two o’clock, which is when I start my shift. The only weekend showing I can manage is the nine:thirty. Is anyone interested? I’m considering dropping in on it before the Saturday Clubhouse Party. I’d get there unpardonably late, if I could but care.

Before I finally fell asleep, I lie in the dark alone for awhile while Ryan and Eva were in the livingroom, trying to pretend that I had my bed to myself, (excepting the ferret I had lodged in my belly). But for the five days he was at DragonCon, Ryan‘s been with me every day for almost three months. The feeling was alien, as if stretching out was a transgression against the basic nature of the world.

your basement’s on fire would make a delightful in store euphimsim


ScanImage171
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

There is something startling about the first kiss. It’s always a surprise, even if you’ve known for a year that it was coming.

I wore a police cap in the store today. It kept falling forward onto my eyes, resting on my glasses and obscuring my vision. Someone said it looked too appropriate to be sexy and I laughed. My sleeves are pink silk today, and everything else is covered in wine velvet. I look as if I dressed to span three centuries and I forgot to brush my hair. It floated in a tousled corona of cloud around my head until I went out into the rain to fetch us tea from the Starbucks on the corner. I stood a minute outside the shop while my hands were slowly scorched by the cups of hot water and looked up into the sky, fascinated by the feeling of light wind and water falling out of the heavens, feeling a moment like I was alive instead of pretending to be infatuated by a little grinding retail life. It soaked me enough that I could tie my hair in a passable knot and be done with it. I’m fairly certain my manager didn’t notice the delay. She stands outside intermittently and smokes.

Every time I approach the red velvet curtain that separates the store proper from the storage area haphazardly filled with sex toys, I face a a row of unpleasantly shiny vaginas in clear cases winking at eye level and inwardly wince. It’s a vision of cheaply kept entertainment, our back area. The door to our bathroom has broken off its hinges. To the left plastic bins messily marked ANAL (small) and HARD DILDOES in block letters with black permanent marker are stacked on cheaply made metal shelves, to the right is a wall plastered in tiny crabby notes on how to properly run the store written by people who aren’t familiar with what needs to be done. I am continually impressed at how difficult it is to find anything in a place where black marker writing is on everything. LIGHTSWITCH, ALLURE, NIPPLE CLIPS, ALL CROTCHLESS PANTIES, POCKET ROCKETS, REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS, SOFT VIBRATORS, ANKLE CUFFS, MENS, ALL GARTER BELTS, PLEASE REMEMBER TO REMOVE BATTERIES FROM TOYS BEFORE PUTTING THEM BACK ON THE WALL, BEADS, BOOTY SHORTS. It just goes on, and yet everything is moved every day. It would be an adventure if the prizes were anything I wanted to find.

today someone called me by my middle name


Alto Firenze!
Originally uploaded by Iv0/0vi.

Traffic at this time of the morning is mostly trains. Heavy rumbles of solid metal thunder grumbling too far away to hear properly, fog horns mournful through the record scratch sound of violent heavy rain. If I were to speak, my voice would be a surprising sound, something too big for the space of my hearing to encompass without setting off a quickened heartbeat.

Even my music is off.

Ryan is asleep and recovering from being mildly ill. This was ostensibly to be his last day at work, but they decided to have him on a couple more days before his contract with them runs out. Hours are welcome, he says, and I believe him. We are young and finances not bright. The jobs we have are tenuous, the jobs we have [are/our] small grinding wheels. I don’t have the skills to find myself something better and currently it seems he doesn’t have the will.

  • Red blood cells fitted with artificial tails.
    (quicktime here).

    Respirocytes – Designing an Artificial Red Cell.

    Concern is dawning.

    • А робот красивый всетаки.

    There’s something outrageous in the soft budding implications of the right kind of whorled red roses. My fingers want to slip inside the warm coloured heart of them and stroke outward. Then lick. Usually I am a sane girl, careful in my associations, not prey to flighty fancies, but occasionally there’s just something about flowers. The impulses leap, as if from a slipped leash, and land, quivering, in front of a garden of alluring possibilities, fiercely demanding meaning to be applied to simple explainable mundane things.

    “I bought him flowers here before I left. I wonder what happened to them. They were beautiful enough to eat.” She’s standing, weight on her hip, with her head slightly tilted to the side, one hand making vague gestures in the air. In her pocket was a gun made of black ink, a paper paged monstrosity of honest secrets, his phone number. He hung the moon. Her eyes tighten. “No, I don’t want to know.“

  • zombie make-up tips.
  • a bloodsucking dalek
  • zombie infection simulation

    The owner of Love’s Touch is a pleasant coppery woman, friendly and prosaic. She’s asked me to start tomorrow for a short shift beginning at eleven. In my interview she asked my age and after my family. Both of which are usually not allowed, but in this case I understand. Significant others or parents are known to threaten girls who work in such places, as if the sex toys on the back wall mitigate them from all social responsibility. All bet’s off, there’s latex present. “You don’t have the kind of boyfriend who would crash in and grab you by the neck, yelling, if he found out you worked here, do you?” My first reaction is, “Dear me, people would put up with those people?” before I remember, well, yes. Of course they do. Everyone does at some point or another, it’s just a matter of extremity, how willing one is to be victimized.

    • a black and white picture day


    Robert Moog, the gentle genius known to many as the
    father of electronic music, died at his North Carolina
    home yesterday. He was 71.

    “One day after losing Bob Moog, the electronic music community has lost one of its greatest composers, musique concrete and found-sound composer Luc Ferrari. Ferrari not only was the founding director of an academy dedicated to musique concrete but continued to advance the notion of recorded sound as music with experiments like turning a recording of a Yugoslav village into music. The fact that we now find such innovations old-hat is partly due to the influence he had.” link

    Moog link.

  • Beths’ concert was delightful and Ethan’s sister very very sexy.
  • Tomorrow I have a job interview at an erotic costume shoppe. I am amused. There may be enough irony to give me escape velocity from the tawdry implications.
  • My keyboard seems to have died. I’m currently using an iMac keyboard off my roommate. It’s literally a pain to use, further proof that the designers were all sadists. If anyone knows of a cheap place to get ergonomic keyboards, my wrists would be exceedingly grateful.
  • Also, zombie make-up. Anyone have anything particular in mind?

    … and from zombies, we get:

  • remote controlled humans

    • I’m tired, you’re sick, we’re not sleeping, you haven’t called me yet


    Chicago sculpture
    Originally uploaded by mosaic22.

    Rain is falling tonight, water against the windows sliding down into water on the street. It’s such a Vancouver evening, warm except for the chill of wet clothes. There was no one on the streets, cars absent, pedestrians a myth. I like the smell coming in from outside, it detaches me from time in a healthier way than my day to day wandering has been.

    I forget how old I am a lot. On my knees, I asked your name. I asked for a moment, for a dream of needing me. Could you please, just one moment, do you see how pretty I can be? I saw you there, you put your hand on my shoulder as if you knew me. For the first time, I finally understood the meaning of having a name. Heaven was a place.

  • New York Times on the Theremin.

    One way to look at tonight is that I was getting paid for my opinion. I was in a focus group on the upcoming mayoral election. Burrard street, they gave us sandwiches, little bits of carrot cake. Draw a picture of your perfect mayor, what do you think of this man’s politics? I was more of a force than I thought I would be. Youngest one there, but supplying everyone with words, vocabulary. He answered my questions particularly. What she said.

    7:30 pm Thursday, we’re meeting at Tinseltown to watch The Aristocrats. (check out how the cast list never ends.)

    shadowblue discovered tonight the Canadian Heraldic Authority. “Apparently it was established in 1988, and all you have to do to get one is send a proper letter and a biography of yourself to the Chief Herald of Canada. It’s all very interesting — corporations can get them, too. Canada’s the first Commonwealth country to get its own heraldic authority, apparently. When your petition is approved by the Chief Herald, they basically consult with you to come up with something good.” Governor General Adrienne Clarkson’s coat of arms is Gules a Chinese phoenix regarding a lightning flash and rising from flames issuant from a maple leaf the whole ensigned by a representation of the Royal Crown all Or. It would be delightful if a group of us drummed up a brainstorming session to create some ourselves.

    Don’t you want one?

    • I like the hydrocarbons


    Lisa 459
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    if you mix an acid and a base, you get salt

    Life lately has been slightly less than hectic and at best a distraction. War has raged back and forth over the hours of every day I’ve been awake. Ryan put me to sleep earlier today, a blessing, one hand on my head like an affectionate priest. Half an hour to clear my head. Fireworks and fireworks, it’s been a western world meets east things-are-eyes-averted two weeks. I look in the mirror and I see a face that looks like it’s been minutely sewn to a skull. I was fired on Friday You’re a creative person, and I’m sure elsewhere you will go far. It was a little speech, she walked up to my desk, said, “this is close enough” then control room said LAUNCH. Her black hair is pretty, but her smile is not as frequent as mine. My reading outpaces, a personality conflict, multi-tasking apparently a sign of inattention. As I walked away I thought, “This has been just as long as a theatre run, this has been a show.”

    the core of the earth is a molten ball of lead

    Saturday before last, I went similarly to the fireworks site. No change in confidence, but with a settled step, accepting the ground I was pacing. I arrived smiling. A steady walk in unfamiliar boots, all of this looked familiar, I knew what I could do and how much I needed to learn. Jay looked me over, we hadn’t seen each other in a while, our interactions being defined by fire and firewater and neither being a matter of course anymore, and his eyes checked for boots, but stuck at my throat. “I can’t believe you’re wearing jewelry.”

    core of my earth is molten : my thyroid gland is a fire-engine : my earth is molten

    There was a hawk that circled the site for hours, it snapped open its great wings against the bright gray sky and looked down at us and our trestles as if considering prey. Later the sun burned off the clouds, banishing both the prospect of rain or a decent temperature. The reflected sun off the water and sand was dreadful, a burning reminder that the bright thing in the sky is made of fusion. We stripped off our shirts by mid-day and danced with conversation, touching upon everything internet terrible. Linda Lee, ostensibly one of the more experienced pyrotechs, wasn’t as internet literate as the rest of us and it left her laughing in shock as we continued to up the edgy. She had a wonderful guessed definition of slashfic that went beyond irony somewhere into painfully appropriate.

    I love you

    No one took pictures of my miniature inferno.

    priorities suffering (this is a repeat)

    I’m worn.

    I lost a job today. One I needed for well being more than anything fiscal. They were kind there, and laughed. Instead I will be setting the sky on fire. Taking wires and powders and alchemy. One night crying with chemicals in the dark where no will see me but they’ll see what I make.. Part of me knows I’ll think of you when I press the silver button. I’ll blame it on your pictures and where you live. If I’m lucky, I won’t say your name. It’s been a hard year and I can’t forget your eyes. Every time someone puts their hand to mine, I remember yours, fresh in my mind. How the tips only just overlapped yours, how my fingers were slightly longer in relation to my palm. Then I remember kisses and I have to close my eyes. I tried to put together something for you tonight, I needed a distraction, something to bring myself out of how hurt I’m living, but weariness took over, and now I’m writing this letter instead.

    I’m not sure why. I think it’s a survival reflex, hoping to break the silence.