New blog digs

Hey, dudes and dudettes! Just FYI, I’ve FINALLY set up a WordPress blog at my personal website, over at buttontapper.com, so I will likely be updating there rather than here in the near future. (I know, I know: cue moaning and complaining about how I change my web addresses the way some people change the colour of their hair.) You might want to update your bookmarks, if you’ve got ‘em.

XO,
Laura

A Thousand Different Words for Snow

Originally uploaded by Black Heart Magazine

You know how people always claim that the Inuit (or “Eskimos,” as less-than-racially-sensitive Americans call them) have thousands of different words for snow? I think it’s a myth, or at least an exaggeration, but in any case, people from Down South are always asking me about Montreal winters. “How bad is it?” they want to know.

Here’s how bad.

It’s snowing fat flakes right now, the big juicy kind that go “plop!” in your face and make your glasses all wet and blurry. The kind that stick. The kind that are good for balling up and throwing at people, if you’re into that sort of thing, or for making snowmen or falling backwards into and making an angel.

I may not have thousands of words for snow, but I’ve got lots of different ways to describe snow, for sure.

It’s -11 (C). That’s +12 (F). And yes, I do like talking about the weather. Maybe it’s boring to some people, but those people just don’t get it.

Seven Things: The Meme of the Whatsit

I’m pretty sure avflox tagged me on this meme months ago, but I couldn’t think of anything at the time, so I didn’t post in return. I have now been tagged by jarvitron over at his blog, so it’s now or never. Put up or shut up. Or something else of that nature.

And yes, I apologize for referring to people by the Twitter handles, but since that’s how I seem to be getting all my news of the world lately (including pix from yesterday’s Hudson River plane crash), that’s how it goes. Deal with it.

Okay… Seven Things You Don’t (Couldn’t Possibly?) Know About Me:

1. My lips are always chapped. I’ve got about 9 million brands of lip balm, lip gloss, lip softeners, whatever, and my favourite is Burt’s Bees (which my sister first introduced me to), but I am rarely seen applying any of these products. I don’t know why, but I think it has to do with the fact that I am always terrible at keeping these products on my lips, where they belong. I smear them off onto people I’m kissing, onto coffee mugs, onto glasses of water or wine. I have to re-apply every time I brush my teeth or go outside wearing a scarf up over my mouth. It’s just too much effort. So even though I am stashing little containers of lip goop in all my bags and pockets all the time, I am rarely using them, hence my chapped lips. Good god, you could spend years dissecting that with a therapist, couldn’t you? Luckily…
2. I don’t do therapy. And I’ve lived in New York City, where everyone, literally everyone, had a therapist. Including their dogs and cats and little mice. Except me. I think that unless you’re out of ideas or suffer from genuine medical conditions like schizophrenia, you probably don’t need a therapist, you need a good friend who will listen to you talk, offer you friendly advice, and then not get upset when you refuse to take it. Hey, I could be totally wrong or even totally psycho here, but that’s my opinion. Then again, I’m a writer, so it’s likely that all the things so-called normal people chat with a shrink about for thousands of dollars per year is somehow getting sorted out in my obsessive journalling/blogging/writing for whomever will pay me and even some who won’t. To each his or her own.
3. Lately, it seems to me that anything with peanut butter as one of its main ingredients is gold. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, spicy Asian-style peanut sauce on noodles or dumplings, peanut butter straight from the jar… it’s all good. I could eat it every day.
4. I am a former vegetarian. I one day decided to stop eating meat, as all the news about bird flu and hormones in meat, cannibal cows being fed their own kind ground up in the feed, the shitty things people do to achieve commercial meats mass produced were getting to me. They turned me off completely, and it wasn’t a big deal for me to eliminate it from my diet. I didn’t want it, didn’t have a taste for it anymore. So I went for about a year as a vegetarian, learned how to cook, started eating a lot more variety. I even liked tofu, as much as one can like tofu. And then one day I started craving meat again, and it didn’t seem to me that vegetables were that much better off, what with the genetic modifications and pesticides and nastiness involved with the mass production of all food these days, so I was like what the hell? The system’s fucked, and I’m too poor to afford organic (i.e. clean) food, so fuck it. I’m not going to push it on anyone, but it doesn’t seem to me that most people—vegetarians or otherwise—know anything about eating healthily anyway. We just eat what we like. I’d love to see the system cleaned up by crusaders, but going veggie ain’t gonna change the meat industry or even the way farmers grow their crops.
5. I used to play the flute. And I was pretty damn good at it. I was usually in one of the first 3 chairs in our school’s band or orchestra in junior high and high school. But I hated it. Well, at first I loved it, as kids do when they start learning something new in 4th or 5th grade, but I always hated practicing. My mom was always on my case about it, especially in high school when I had a private instructor, but I would breeze through the stuff once and then basically sight-read when I had my lessons. I even had a nice open holed Gemeinhardt with a silver headjoint, and I would probably still take it out occasionally to see what I could do except some bastard fuckface stole it from me when he was “helping” me move. ADAM KELLY: I WANT MY FLUTE BACK, YOU TALENT-FREE MISOGYNIST ASSHOLE!
6. I think I need to pick up and move every few years to feel like I am doing something with my life. I don’t want to feel like I am “stuck” somewhere, like I have no options, the way I always felt when I was growing up in some nice safe suburbs where my mother tried to get me to feel like I was in danger every time I left the house to go for a walk. I know she meant well and was just trying to protect me, but it made me feel smothered, like I would live and die in the same nowhere town all my life, and do nothing of any importance, and that made me want to scream. I still don’t know if I am doing anything of any “importance,” but at least I feel like I am in charge of my own destiny, that I have options. I never, ever want to live in the suburbs again; I think I might literally die of boredom. Either that or of some horrid suburban ennui that causes me to slit my wrists in the bathtub. How Sylvia fucking Plath.
7. I feel like I can’t write fiction anymore, if I ever could. I’ve been reading some books, hoping to figure out what the problem is, but I think it might just be simple self-absorption: I’ve never really written anything that wasn’t, in some respects, about me. And I suppose all fiction is like that (no matter how hard the author will rail against the idea), but it frustrates me nevertheless. Aren’t I supposed to be using my imagination? Maybe mine’s broken, like Bender’s is in that horrible Futurama movie, Bender’s Game. Unlike Bender, however, I refuse to turn to D&D to work this out. I can’t deal with gamer geeks and RPGs, so you can bite my shiny metal ass.

So there you go. Time now to tag some 7 victims? How about a different approach: If you’ve read this, consider yourself tagged, and get to work!

GODZILLA!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just woke up from one of the worst dreams I’ve had in a while. (Okay, to be fair, I am already looking back and laughing at it, but still, it was scary at the time.) It involved me, a group of people trying to make their way to a wedding, and… GODZILLA!!!

Feel free to commence a discussion regarding the qualities of Godzilla’s roar (i.e. which sounds are involved in its creation: elephant? lion? tiger? the sound of metal bending?), as well as the relative merits of Godzilla’s various Japanese incarnations vs. the American Godzilla.

But back to the original point, which was my dream! Godzilla was far more ferocious than any of his movie versions, at times stalking us more like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. He was also smaller than the Tokyo-crushing giant usually is, though this only added to his scariness, as he was now much faster. In any event, Nightmare Godzilla was evil (as always) and was picking off wedding party members left and right! We were running, hiding, trying to avoid the bloodshed. Finally we reached the gate of the church. It was locked! There was a sign posted that said it would be open as of 8 AM, and we were all yelling, “It’s 8 AM! Why is the gate still locked?!” and then “OMG! The guy who opens the gates was probably eaten by Godzilla!!”

The horror, people, the HORROR!

Also, I don’t know how this related to the Godzilla part, but someone was trying to stab me with a knife, and at some point he succeeded in shopping off my hand—WTF?! I believe the dream also rewound and replayed that sequence several times, for maximum gross-out effect.

This is what happens when you watch End of Days before bed, kids. I blame MPIX, the world’s shittiest movie channel. I mean, they’re playing The Shadow next, for fuck’s sake. There’s just no redemption.

Pick a Charity, Any Charity: Memorial Donations and Twestival Montreal

In the spirit of Operation NICE, I’ve been thinking about how to do more good in 2009. Today I mailed a sympathy card to my grandfather, and I’ve been pondering the thought of donating money to a charity in memory of my grandmother. The question is: which one?

I just donated money to Amnesty International (as documented in a previous post), so I figure I should pick a different worthy cause. Of course, there are millions of charities to choose from, and I’d like to get the most bang for my buck, while also being somehow appropriate. I want to pick something that I think my grandmother would have been proud of, but I’m not sure what that is.

The obvious choice would be to donate to some kind of Catholic charity or church-funded initiative (and there are plenty of them), but as I’m a non-practicing atheist, that doesn’t quite sit right with me. So what would be a good alternative?

One thing I do remember about my grandmother was that when she was still in good health, she liked to paint. She did oil paintings, usually still life types of things, but sometimes of birds and other nature she might have observed in her backyard. Living in a desert (i.e. Arizona), there were usually hummingbirds flitting around, as well as other small birds that could survive the heat and the lack of rainfall. So I’m thinking perhaps a donation to the Nature Conservancy would be appropriate, as they offer the Adopt an Acre program, where you can choose the region you’d most like to help preserve, as well as the Plant a Billion Trees campaign. They also have an 800 number listed for “tribute giving,” which is what I’m looking for.

I’m just worried they will want a huge gift in order for it to be considered a “tribute,” so I’m emailing them right now to find out what exactly the tribute giving involves and why it must be done on the phone rather than online. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I noticed that one of my Twitter friends, AdeleMcAlear, was looking for volunteers for something called Twestival, so I DMed her to find out more. She informed me that the idea is a Twitter festival, happening on February 12, which will attempt to raise money for Charity: Water. After reading a bit about the charity in question and finding out that they donate 100% of their funds to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations (currently, by building wells in Ethiopia), I decided to join her band of volunteers and see what I could do. As of right now, she’s still in search of more volunteers and sponsors, so if you or someone you know in the Montreal area would be able to help out with anything from finding and securing a venue to publicity to the actual running of the event or anything else you can think of, please get in touch with her via Twitter!

I don’t know what the event will be like, but we’re going to try to have a meeting next week at some point, so if you can get involved in this, please do. It looks like a great project, and I’d love to be able to help raise some money for this. Indeed, perhaps this would be a better tribute to my grandmother’s memory than my first thought, though I figure both are equally worthy causes.

If you had to pick a charity memorial for a family member, what would it be? Alternately, if you were to (god forbid!) kick the proverbial bucket today, where would you want people to donate their money in lieu of flowers?