May 2007 Archives

• back from the hospital.
• lucid. sort of.
• slowly renourshing myself with various forms of soup-like food.
• trying to figure out why the back of my neck hurts so much.
• in desperate need of new songs.
• really missing my place downtown.

Last night I got to spend my first night ever in the hospital. Well, it might have been my second night. There is a chance that I spent my first night in the hospital when I was four, getting tubes put in my ears. The problem with that is I can't really recall much. I remember being put under, and I remember waking up in a recovery room next to a girl who had also gone through surgery. I also know that at the time I thought I was going to marry this girl, because that's just what happens. You recover from less than traumatic surgery in the same room, fall madly in love, and live happily ever after. As you guessed, it didn't really work out like that. I hope I didn't break the poor girls heart.

Yesterday out of nowhere my throat started bleeding. Despite the fact that I had my tonsils removed on Friday, I was still under the distinct impression that this was not a good sign. So after bleeding for two hours without it stopping my mom got home and took me to the hospital. I got rushed in past the first waiting room, saw a doctor relatively quickly, and then waited. The problem with having something like a bleeding throat is you need to see the ENT on call. Odds are that the ENT on call is also the ENT who is performing all the ENT surgeries in the hospital that day. So you don't get to do anything but spit up blood, swallow blood, and wait.

Six hours after everything started I saw the ENT. Who was happy enough to tell me that he was going to get the bleeding stopped, only the ORs were all packed and it was going to be a while. By a while he meant another three hours. Three hours that I made the mistake of falling asleep for. A mistake, because when you're not awake you don't spit the blood out, you let it seep into your stomach. This was bad.

When I finally did come around to getting in an OR I had blood gushing like crazy. Then the blood gushing turning into blood vomiting; lots of blood vomiting. Like I was the Old Faithful of Blood vomiting. Which meant they needed a newer, bigger, IV for me. I liken it to the King Kong of IVs. Those things hurt going in, just in case you were wondering.

I'd describe the actual experience of my first night in a hospital to you but I don't really remember it. I do remember breakfast, which was 114mL of Orange Juice and some number of measurement in Lime Jello. I hate Jello so much. So, so much. Now I'm going to try and make it through the day without anymore blood. So much for work, and so much for school.

Let's talk about Mika, the new UK artist who's trying really hard to make it big here. Nancy's already heard most of what I have to say about Mika, but a few things that happened to day have lead me to decide to try and formulate these thoughts into something solid.

Now you may or may not know that I read Towleroad regularly. So odds are I heard about Mika long before any of you did. I should say read about Mika, instead of heard. I listened to about ten seconds of a clip before realising I hated it and turning it off. I can't even tell you if it was Grace Kelly. I can tell you that what felt like more than a few months later, I recognised his obnoxious voice coming out of Joey's iTunes.

From the beginning I was negatively biased towards Mika. As much as Andy at Towleroad might love Mika because he got this label with a song about how he was rejected by a first label for not being willing to change, I just see a second record label who sees a market for people with image issues who want to see Mika as their saviour. I.e. most of the people I know in Sheridan's Music Theatre Program who don't sound the way they look and then don't have an instantly marketable image. Or, more simply, fags.

The other day I went shopping with Nancy. I cracked and bought Mika's first album out here, something about gay whatever homo rainbow. I might have made that up. But 'Grace Kelly' was an extremely catchy song as much as I hated to admit it. It will randomly pop into my head every once and a while and I'll be stuck with it for a good chunk of the day. Let's just say the album was not like that.

Actually, let's just say that album was a piece of crap. I wish I hadn't bought it. I really wanted the Timbaland CD too, but when I got to HMV I couldn't remember that so I bought Mika instead. I regret it. And today, my regret was solidified.

Tonight, I was listening to the radio as I drove downtown with my mom to pick up my math books from my place. For those of you that don't know Z103, it's southern Ontario's biggest top-40 pop station. It has more than one tower set to 103.5 with a huge broadcasting range. It also runs a show weekdays from 7:00p to 7:30p called Pump It Or Dump It, where they play a song and then listeners vote on it.

Tonight's song was Mika's Love Today. And it was dumped by 97%.

So last night, I found an ex was kind enough to put up with me on msn. I had finally reached a breaking point and after sitting in my room for three days straight I stumbled downstairs and sat by my front door with my MacBook. I normally have a hard time talking to my exes, because that's the kind of person am I, but I was completely willing to suck it up and be a better person in exchange for pseudo-human contact.

After catching up and talking about everything that's happened over the last few months, he mentioned something casually in a story about his friend and his friend's boyfriend. And you know those moments in thrillers where you know something bad is about to happen, and you want to stop it, but there's nothing you can do about it? Ya, full on one of those moments. Because that friend's boyfriend? He had definitely been extremely forward about wanting to go to a movie and hang out sometime every single time we were out drinking. Oh, and of course, I had to sleep with him too. Or else this wouldn't be a good story.

So I owned up to my guilt, and then phoned a friend and went out for tea and mutual bitching (Topic: Failures of the straight dating scene vs. Failures of the gay dating scene). Keep in mind that through all of this I'm still heavily medicated, in pain, and have the potential to start bleeding at any point in time and drown. Not relevant, but a fun fact to add to my crankiness.

Then I get phone call from a friend informing me that the boyfriend wants to kick my ass for spreading rumours. Hello breaking point. By that point I was very happily medicated, so I can't actually tell you how the conversation went. But I can say with certainty that I was more than likely unnecessarily rude to a friend who had nothing to do with it. I'm all about shooting the messenger, and then the message.

On the plus side I almost slept normally last night, AND I am totally motivated to try and do the banner myself because no one seems to be willing to help me with it. Nothing to help cope with emotional exhaustion like a redesign.

There is this blog I keep bookmarked because everyone once and I while I need a reminder that somewhere out there, there are still people dumber than me. Yes I know, I'm a horrible person, etc. etc. But when you've spent 48 hours without leaving your bed you suddenly start doubting everything about yourself. Then this guy comes in to remind me that in the grand scheme of things, I'm not that bad.

Entries (all of which have horrible grammar, and are hard to follow) alternate from two topics. The first is about how he is such a good gay father, even though his gay son is a bitch with an attitude problem. Because that is exactly how I expect to hear good parents describing their children. The second is about all the casual sex he has with randoms. Seriously. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

Being dead has given me a lot of times to have crazy drug induced dreams about Starbucks and public transit and Dark Age of Camelot and Harvest Moon games. Separately, not together, or else it would be one cracked out dream. I've also been reading a lot of blog posts. One of which happened to be about how Seattle launched a test of its new multi-county LRT system to complement its commuter rail line. (Fun fact: they use the same bi-level cars developed for GO Trains)

I've always wondered why GO Transit never considered upgrading some of its busier bus routes to LRT instead of to a busway. (Information on the busway can be found here at Spacing's Wire.) Again and again all we hear about is the upper bound that bus routes have for capacity.

Sound Transit, which serves the area around Seattle (and the Sound, I assume), is currently building a long LRT line to complement the expansion of it's commuter train line the Sounder.

Image courtesy of Sound Transit until I have server access again.

Information on the first section to open in 2009 can be found here, along with an image of the LRT cars being used. They look to be about the length of a ALRV downtown. (Adam, that means the bendy ones).

While anything is better than sticking buses in traffic, the busway is going to be along the 403/401 for the most part, which doesn't do much good for moving people around a city. It's only good at moving people through it. I don't know much about the actual schematics for building an LRT vs a LRTs do a lot better in tunnels than buses do, are most aesthetically pleasing, and generally have better pull on commuters than buses. Might be something worth looking into.

Where is my family while I am in bed dying? Why, they're downstairs having a pre-party, being loud and obnoxious and blasting shitty classic rock.

Sure, let's completely ignore the fact that the bell on my cat made me throw up earlier. Thanks guys.

Four years ago almost everyone I knew in person had a blog. I wouldn't even say that it was the fad that had caught on strong. I was the only person who joined in at the height of the fad. They had all been established bloggers by that point. Now I'm the only one left.

I don't know what the exact thing was that triggered that realisation. It would probably be the fact that I am sitting in front of my computer without much to read. It's hard for me to read something by someone I don't have a lot of interest in. There are a few good sites that cover material that I'm interested in well, which I always check. But the rest of sites I have book marked are for reasons that I'm not even really sure about. Most of them are by people who write like I do. Only they're not me, and they're not my friends, and they don't occasionally write extremely rude things about people. See my problem?

I'm going to do some browsing now that I'm on pain medication and see if I can find anything exciting. I'll let you know how it turns out.

P.S. Go get the new Maroon 5 CD; it's brilliant.

Today I had my tonsils out. Tonight my family had a huge BBQ dinner. There is no justice in the world.

Last night I watched the three hour special for Lost's Season Finale. I started watching lost right at the beginning of season two with my friends on their computers and got way to into it for my own good. I haven't seen much of season one, and I don't think I will anytime soon. It's not exactly the kind of thing you can go back and watch after seeing preceding episodes. By the time I got around to watching season three I found myself incredibly frustrated with the character dynamic on the show. Locke made me want to shoot people. Ben made me want to shoot even more people. It got to the point where I stopped watching for a few episodes because I was so frustrated with how it seemed they were never going to get off the island. I can only be lead by the nose for so long.

So seeing bits of the future finally worked into the episode was incredibly satisfying. Upsetting, but satisfying. It's was so nice to see that the finally do get off the island, even if Jack's life is a wreck. It was so satisfying to see tons of the Others getting blown up, and I had a love-hate relationship with Tom getting a cap busted in him. I missed some of the most recent episodes, so it was nice to see the clip where they showed that Ben had arranged the destruction of the DHARMA initiative. I was so excited by the episode that I started yelling at the TV near the end, and stayed up all night because I had such a high. I can't wait for season four.

I am surrounded by pretty ikea pillow cases and furniture boxes. It will get even more exciting when I'm done work tomorrow and get to put them together.

Today marks a conscious effort on my part to pay more attention to this. Thanks to Facebook a lot of things that I would have normally mentioned go unsaid. Not anymore (I hope).

I've finally finished moving back downtown. I'm now sleeping on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by all my stuff in suitcases and boxes. I'd take pictures so you could all poke fun at my current state of living, but as you might remember my mother broke my camera and refused to replace it. I'm not bitter, I swear. Or at least I won't be when I get all my new Ikea furniture.

The courses I'm taking this summer have jumped into full swing. It's only been a week and I've already started to try and accept the fact that for the next few months I'm going to have multiple quizzes and tests every single week.

Tonsils come out on the 25th after working almost every single day before that. Pirates of the Caribbean also comes out on the 25th. Anyone up for seeing it at midnight with me?

Here is a list of things you're allowed to pester me into writing about because I want to, I'm just lazy most of the time:

• My Ode to Bonsai
• My two weeks in Oakville
• My brother being stupid.

However many months ago when I redid my layout, I talked to Torie quickly about what I wanted to do in terms of a banner. It was decided that as soon as it was nice out we would take a picture and try and figure out how to do a vector art scene matching the colours to place me in. Well as you can see that didn't exactly work out. It's finally nice out, and Torie is Jamaica. She's the only person I know who just picks up and goes to a place like Jamaica on a whim (it's not the first time either).

By the time I get a banner up, I will have probably moved a second time. Which is probably for the best. Oakville is eating my brain up. Yesterday I spent hours walking around because I had nothing better to do. It's amazing how different Oakville looks when you're walking through it instead of driving. If you get the chance, I encourage you to take a walk. It's also been rumoured that the walk gets even better under the influence of certain substances, not that I'm going to openly encourage or admit to their use here.