I’ve got the apartment bit nailed down, finally. A nice little place near Dixie and Bloor in Mississauga, top floor, amenities, etc. One of the best price/benefit ratio places I think we’ve looked at yet. Thankfully, I can move in on the 12th, meaning that I can slowly transfer all my stuff out of my old place over the course of a week or so, instead of all at once.

I hope to have some sort of housewarming party a while after we’ve moved in, so you can all mark your “sometime in the future” calendars. Unless I don’t know you or don’t like you. Then you pretty much shouldn’t bother.

It’s about fifteen minutes east of where I’m living now. Pretty close to the Mississauga/Toronto border. So that means some changes, right there.

Well, it turns out the old saying is true: if more than one person knows a secret, it’s no longer a secret. I hate not being able to trust people with information, but at least eventually you know who to scratch off that list. You know. That list.

My landlady informed me tonight that she’s going to be using the basement for her daughter’s business ventures, and I will have to move out by the end of July.

If that isn’t some sort of sign from God, I don’t know what is.

Women, stop making excuses for your men. They’re not having a bad day, they didn’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed, they don’t just every once in a while do that, they’re not flawed but essentially good people, they’re not whatever excuse you’re making.

Look, sin is sin. I don’t talk about it a lot, but still, those are the facts. Whether your husband or your brother or your father or your boyfriend is having sex with animals or screaming curses and throwing stuff at the wall or beating you or constantly demeaning you, it doesn’t matter.

It comes down to whether you’re helping or hurting? Because I know this much: excuses never make anything better. You cover something up, it doesn’t go away. It grows.

There’s pretty much nothing in the world that can destroy that last vestige of respect, that can tear away the one tiny remaining shred of hope, that can crush whatever slim aura of dignity managed to survive, that seeing a grown man act like a spoiled, petulant three-year-old. And then seeing him do that over and over and over again well into middle age.

That’ll do it, Mr Ballmer.

I found this post in my “saved but not posted” section and thought it was interesting. So here goes.

You think to yourself, there is a reason. And yes, you’re right, there is. Or maybe there isn’t and you just don’t realise it yet. That’s the obscenity of the whole thing, isn’t it? Even in these things you need to believe a reason’s out there somewhere, when the simplest and easiest answer is that there’s no answer at all.

If you turn over the coin, people suck, and people do horrible things to eachother, and people aren’t worth it. Then again, you and I aren’t so different in that we do horrible things to other people, are we? We simply do different horrible things. And while this may sound to you like a measure of equivocation, I assure you it is not. It’s the difference between throwing a brick at someone’s head and mortaring bring upon brick until someone is suffocating and must somehow escape.

Different people escape differently. There, that was equivocation. Of course, it’s still true. The truth of it doesn’t make it right, though it’s still true. Remember that. Different people escape differently. You may find yourself in a long line of people scrambling away, if you keep turning that coin over in your fingers.

I think there’s something about yourself that you don’t know. It must be, because in all the years I knew you, there was something about you didn’t know either, and I was as close to knowing you as I think anyone’s ever gotten. Do you remember talking about the distance? Was it me, or was it you? I still don’t know, and in all likelihood never will, though I’ll stop caring in a while.

I still think there’s something about yourself that you don’t know. I hope you find it, and face it. I hope you stop the dichotomy of self-love and self-hate you’ve always seemed to present.

I think to myself, there is a reason. Of course there is. Nothing never come from nothing. Or something always comes from something else. I don’t believe for a moment in things a priori. The simplest and easiest answer here is, of course, that the answer is somewhere you have yet to look.

1. Hot coffee on a cold morning.
2. Kisses from my honey.
3. Warm bread dipped in olive oil spiced with bitter herbs.
4. Sinking into bed after a long, hard day of work.
5. Friends. Either way you want to take that.
6. City lights at night.
7. Writing in a coffee shop, even though my comp sucks.
8. A good book, way too late.
9. The UK.
10. A park in the middle of the city.
11. New York.
12. Games of Scrabble with people better than me.
13. Hearing you laugh.

I’m giving up my residential phone line and number for a reason, yes. That reason is I’m on a cost-cutting kick right now and I figure I can shave off $30 or so from my expenses each month by not actually having a land line. It also lets me have a cell phone (something I’ve dearly, dearly needed for a long time now). All I have to do now is convince my work that I need a cell phone, and I’m pretty much scott-free, as long as none of my cow-orkers read this.

This is why I’m also not taking showers anymore.

Hah. I’m just kidding.

Or… am I?

Funny story. In church on Sunday someone said, “Yadda yadda yadda is in your mail slots.” I can’t remember what it was, except that it made me curious. So I go over to my mail slot–they put lots of literature and stuff in there–and am confused.

You see, each mail slot is part of a shelf, and each shelf is labelled with a name, except for the top and bottom (which are, of course, the enclosure that forms the shelf), so you can see the problem. There is an extra slot in there that’s not labelled, making finding your slot somewhat ambiguous. Is it the slot above or below the label? You never really know. I choose to believe that it’s the slot below the label, because people keep putting stuff in there.

But this Sunday, there was stuff in all the slots, meaning someone is confused. At that point it was me. Because there, on the shelf below my name, is my Bible, and on the shelf above my name is a bunch of tapes. So I say to Mr Hamstra, who is standing there also grabbing stuff from his slot, “Which of these slots is mine? And why would anybody give me tapes?”

Mr Hamstra says, “Well, maybe somebody thinks you need them!”

So I pull the first couple of tapes out, and lo and behold they are titled, “Grumbling” and for the pièce de résistance, “Church Discipline”.

As a post-script, I don’t actually think they were meant for me, and if they were, I don’t own anything capable of playing a cassette, so I guess we’re SOL on that one.

Now, I will end this post by complaining and grumbling about the people who ambiguously labelled those shelves. I mean, come on. Gah! It’s terrible! I AM GOING TO FORM A NEW DENOMINATION NOW.

It hasn’t been long since I was in New York, New York with my friend Nick, but it feels like another lifetime, almost. I’m sure almost everyone has that at some point, where some memory seems fragile with age despite its relative youth, but it’s still strange. Or maybe they’re not fragile with age, but rather separating into bits and pieces that surface at odd times and in odd places. I don’t really know; describing something that goes on in my head is complicated enough that I can’t really approach it without a metaphor of some kind.

I remember being in the Museum of Natural History, awed at the sheer size of the blue whale hanging in the marine biology room. Even when Nick left to go back to our hostel, I wandered around that room for hours, taking it in. Nothing I’ve seen since has managed to monopolize my attention like that sea of information. But what really surprised me was the fragility of the environments housing all these alien creatures, as if the ocean is made of tissue paper, as we’re tearing it apart casually, without really understanding what we’re doing.

Sometimes I imagine ships approaching the New World, their hulls almost impeded with the mass of fish roiling in the water. The ocean must seem so empty now, in comparison.

I remember walking the edge of Central Park, almost afraid of going in. The border between the park and the city seemed like a place where a curtain had been drawn open on another world. Like a giant surgeon had removed this rectangle of city and replaced it with this sea of green. All around the edges, the buskers and traders set up their wares; the homeless sat at the intersection of wall and sidewalk. But inside the park itself an air of reverence had laid itself down, only to be broken by a barking dog, a laughing kid, an iPod playing louder than iPods should be allowed.

Can’t say I’d ever want to go in there after dark, but during the day I could pass the veil and imagine I was walking into Narnia. There’s nothing like it here in Mississauga. Nothing even similar.

I remember walking into Penn Station with Nick and seeing armed guards posted at every entrance: the mental scars of 9/11 still hadn’t healed. Everyone was on high alert. Later, viewing the site of the attacks, I imagined the buildings crumbling, imagined the plume of dust and debris spreading through the city. I couldn’t take it all in, that something so tall, so massive, could be reduced to fragments in mere hours, mere minutes.

Thankfully, I’ve never been witness to such events. Hopefully I never will. Sometimes I can picture the panic of that day, and of the aftermath, but I have no desire to be a party to them. I want to go back to New York someday, maybe even live there. The subway, the Starbucks, the hostel, the cigars on the roof, Times Square: it was a wonderful time.