driving home

+ there's a very curious dichotomy between my professional/academic interest in bureaucracies and committee structures and systems of power and "canada" and my abiding fascination of apocalyptic fiction. the fact is that everything i am proud of knowing and understanding in a professional sense would be profoundly useless if everything changed. at the same time, i am fascinated by organisational development and structure and obsessed with its total collapse. the absence of order. there are passages in end zone where gary harkness imagines thousands, millions dead in major cities around the world. nuclear fallout. in other words, the total elimination of any field that i have any comparative advantage in.

+ at the end of november, i walked up victoria drive to sam's house in the snow with vol. 1 of battlestar galactica. it was snowing and my shoes were completely soaked. amanda had spent the night snowed in. the night before, we all trekked out to krisztina's house(at fraser and kingsway, where jan and i had searched for campaign offices a year ago while listening to fleetwood mac) and gar and i walked home in the middle of snowed-in 12th avenue drinking beer. i had a paper due on webCT that night i went to sam's, but i didn't really care. it was a paper on breed-specific legislation for my vegan course (which i got a C+ in). sam cooked chicken. i was asked on sunday night to use my connections to get a snow day called for monday. that wednesday i went to brentwood mall on the way home to buy boots.

+ i'm reading driving to detroit by lesley hazelton. i'm enjoying it, but not as much as i'd hoped i might. i was hoping to be surprised. i'm nervous to read delillo's the names again, in case it's not as good as i recall, which is just silly.

+ i went to washington state four times this summer, and i don't feel that i've examined it all sufficiently yet. i went to seattle, ellensburg, whidbey island, spokane, the grand coulee dam, bellingham, centralia. i also went to portland, oregon and coeur d'alene, idaho. that's all. and i did it all in the passenger seat, because i can't drive. if i could drive, i would.

shoreline to kent

+ i remember oxygen bars. no, i remember the idea of oxygen bars. different flavours, lots of polished steel and surgical tubing. step in and hook yourself up to a respirator. it always seemed so dystopian. are things so bad that we have to pay to breathe flavoured air? i wonder if there are any oxygen bars left. i'd really like to visit one.

i also remember the time (times?) that everyone got tested for hepatitis after eating at capers, vancouver's yuppie health food supermarket. alternatively, the time that three of my classmates got food poisoning from the istanbul mcdonalds, after turning down the turkish restaurant that everyone else went to.

+ i just read margaret atwood's cat's eye. it's a parallel narrative. all reminiscence. how much of what we do in any given situation is informed by what we've done before, who we've known before, where we've physically been.

+ i remember the arch deluxe. clinton gore '96. we 'got' the internet in 1997, i think. we had 100 hours a month, using a 36k modem. i'd stay up late looking at simpsons fansites, yahoo's "hot pick of the day"... i can't even recall anymore.

+ i'm reading don delillo's end zone again, and it's making me dizzy, again.

everything's different now

+ everything isn't really different now, because nothing's really happened. but i like the idea. everything's different now.

+ we went to port alberni. it always feels like going back to 1986 somehow. i love the ferry, the highway, the bookstore, the restaurants. starting in horseshoe bay it's a different province. we came home and took a week off. i spent several days doing nothing but reading. it was a strange limbo, in a sense - i'd started work on the 21st, but couldn't go back until the new year because everything was closed. the break was good, though.

+ that first week in the office was strange, not in the least because i didn't have a key. now it's normal, and wonderfully so. i feel on top of my game, capable and credible. for better or for worse, i feel old.

+ in a sense i've forgotten what i do here. maybe everything is different now.

+ when the snow goes i feel as though i haven't taken proper advantage of it, that a golden opportunity has passed by.