May 2007 Archives

today, i'm wearing nine year old shoes.

they were purchased in Worcester, Massachusetts while visiting my friends heather & gary for their daughter, rowan's, first birthday. it was november 1998. i know this only because rowan turns 10 this year and i've still got enough mental faculties to do basic math -- most of the time.

heather & i, after our friend joe left to go back home to New Joisey, spent a day out shopping at all those amazing amercian stores we don't have here at home. well, they weren't amazing, but they were new and exciting to me. one such store, Marshall's, was beyond my comprehension at the time. of course, now that Winners and HomeSense have burst forth onto the Canadian marketplace i'm used to the concept of designer leftovers at discounted prices, but then? it nearly blew my mind.

now, you should know that when faced with a department store, i make a bee-line for the shoe department. mostly, this comes from never finding any clothes which fit, so shoes were usually my only shot at finding something to buy. these days, i just like looking at shoes, even though my sore feet require the ugly, comfortable variety for functioning without pain. that particular day, i did what i always do and headed for the shoes. very shortly, i came upon a pair of black mary janes with an amazing feature: built in massaging nubbins over the entire foot bed. i don't remember how much they cost, but even though they were almost a size too big i had to have them. c'mon... massaging nubbins? how could i pass that up?

nine years later, the soles are almost worn through, the toes are all scuffed and they're all stretched out, but those massaging nubbins? still there and still massaging! i love these shoes quite irrationally. i've gone through phases where i'd buy and wear other shoes, but i always come back to these. one day, they're going to be beyond rescue and the thought makes me very sad. every time i go out shopping a small part of me is looking for a pair to replace them, but it has yet to happen. i'm starting to give up hope that i'll ever again have anything comfortable to wear on my feet when these have given up the ghost.

sometimes advertising gets me all riled up.

there's a Canon commercial on the radio i hear at least once during each of my morning and afternoon commutes. it's got a married couple looking at a Canon camera flyer and the wife says things like "it's so stylish" and "it would fit in my pocket" about the Elph while the husband prattles on about all the superior technical features of the other model he's interested in. the inference is that women only care about how a camera looks while men are more interested in how a camera works. it's compounded when the man makes a snotty comment about how he doesn't "take" photos, he "makes" them.

not only is it a stupid commercial, it's insulting. the more i hear it, the more pissed off i get. all right, i get that i'm more geeky than the average female. i also concede that i'm more interested in the technical side of photography than most women. that does not mean that the majority of women decide on purchases purely on the object's visual appeal. i'd like to believe that women are smarter than that and to have advertisers reinforce the stereotype is unacceptable in the year 2007.

all i can say is that i'm very glad i'm a Nikon girl (which i chose entirely on specs, btw). take that, Canon!

nothing to say. sorry. i'm boring.

ahh... by the time saturday was half-over, thinking about three more whole days off seemed like such a long time. now that's it's 4:30 tuesday evening and it's back to the grind tomorrow, four days seems way too short.

i don't actually know where the weekend went. i know i spent a lot of it with christopher and his family, either walking the puppy or cooking dinner for his parents. sunday was mostly mine, so i was über-lazy and just stayed home watching tv and slowly getting gussied up for mel & chris' wedding party (which was a lot of fun). today, i kept mostly for myself and i've just finished mad cleaning, to bring the house to base-level clean for the rest of the week.

seriously, i want to know when i became such freakish cleaner. i mean, it's probably good in the long run, but i'm sure friends must think i'm just a little bit insane with the cleaning. i'm not crazy! i just like having things neat and debris-free. is that so wrong? *sob* i think it might be.

sometimes, i get a little wary when people are nice to me. then, when a whole lot of people have a whole lot of good things to say about me, i start to wonder about the collective sanity of the human race. the last few days have been chock full of people saying the nicest things about me TO me, including words such as: angel, wonderful, gorgeous, princess, friendly and brilliant.

it's hard to comprehend, let alone get used to.

last night, after leaving work early to go to the doctor to get drops for the painful ear infection i woke up to, i spent the evening getting caught up on the last three episodes of 'Gilmore Girls' ever to be made. i was good for the third- and second-to-last shows, but the last? i cried for the entire last half of it. i finished off a box of tissues, that's how much abandon i was sobbing with as i watched Rory and Lorelai for the last time. i'm such a pushover for a good mother-daughter show. especially one which was so fast and funny. i really do have a soft spot for fast-talking characters.

i'm glad the storylines ended where they did. there was enough left to our imaginations and no deus ex machina to wrap things up in a ridiculously tidy bow. yet, the closure obtained was completely realistic for the characters involved. Lorelai's mother didn't suddenly become cuddly and warm, nor did Jess or Dean come out of the woodwork to sweep Rory off her feet. i'll miss my weekly visits to Star's Hollow, and i'll always want to be Lauren Graham when i grow up, but i'm glad it ended well, if it had to end at all.

speaking of ending well, i'm so very glad 'Lost' producers have announced a solid end date for the series. i think it could have gone the way of JJ Abrams' other show 'Alias' and just gotten out of hand with the trying to be too clever and tricky. audiences don't like being fucked with for years without getting answers to any of the questions raised. i think if 'Lost' sticks to three more years, as announced, they can write an ending and work backwards from it, ensuring that we're all left satisfied and with no questions hanging. then again, i think the writers for that show are a little bit sick'n'twisted, so it wouldn't surprise me if they left a few things out, just to make us crazy -- and ensure an appetite for a feature film (a la 'X-Files' and 'Twin Peaks').

on my way home from work, i was convinced i'd be up all night trying to get all my cinderella chores done. i hadn't done laundry or dishes since last week, so things were a little too grubby (but not too bad since i was away for the weekend visiting my mom) to have people over for the ANTM finale tonight. surprisingly, i had both big loads of laundry done, monday's huge pile of dishes washed, the floors dusted, the bathroom cleaned and dinner eaten all before 7pm. so, just because i could, i spent the rest of the night catching up on tv i'd missed and trying to hit 1000 points (the pro level) in Wii bowling. i love my Wii.

i'm not enjoying being cut off from the internet during my workdays. it's hard for me to not to have the answer to any question available to me at a moment's notice, the abilty to get a map to somewhere i want to go, or something as trivial as looking up a phone number. it's made worse because i don't want to spend all night sitting in front of the computer to "catch up" on what i'd missed. not only because there are other things to do (like clean or make out with my hot boyfriend), but my chair sucks and i'm already in front of a computer all day, why would i voluntarily spend more time there (don't worry, i recognize the irony seeing as that's all i did for many, many years). it's been almost two months, now. you'd think i'd be over it, but the more time goes by, the more it annoys me. i miss you, internet!

there's a long weekend looming and, for me, it's four days long! i don't have a lot planned, which i usually prefer. there is the biggest social event of the season (aka mel & chris' wedding) on sunday (for which i still need to figure out what i'm wearing -- ack!), otherwise i have nothing on my plate except some chores i never have time for in a normal week and a whole lot of tv i want to catch up on (i'm four weeks behind three different shows). i'm hoping it proves to be lovely and lazy because after this little break, i'll be going pedal to the metal for the three weeks leading up to my HUGE VACATION in june (which is starting to shape up into something lovely, let me say).

i've signed up for twitter. there's a link to my "tweets" (dear god, how i hate that term) in the sidebar. i expect i'll use it for random thoughts while away from the internets, delivered via sms. it should prove entirely dumb.

the next time i think it's a good idea to eat a Twix bar and chips for dinner because i "don't want to cook" or "there's nothing in the house" remind me to think about how unhappy my body is at this very moment.

blargh.

i survived classmates.com, livejournal, friendster, orkut, myspace and consumating, to name but a few evil social-networking web abominations. i'm NOT going to be suckered into drinking the facebook kool-aid.

besides, to quash colene's favourite excuse: i don't look better than my highschool classmates, so why would i want them to see me looking exactly the way i did back then?

oh, and it's totally evil. bad, bad, evil bad.

i have a working theory that my steel-toed work shoes are the cause of all the foot trouble i've been experiencing.

for the first couple months of the year, i'd been plagued by pain in my feet, mostly located in the heel of my right foot. it got so bad that i could barely put any weight on it in the morning and by the end of the day i was limping noticeably when walking. even when sitting with absolutely no pressure applied it would occasionally plague me with stabbing pains. while at the doctor for my vision problem, she referred me to the lab to get orthotics, but also cautioned that it probably wouldn't begin to get better until i'd lost twenty pounds. i never did go to the orthotic lab. i didn't have the time or the money, so i just kept putting it off. the foot would get bad then it would get better, but overall it was usually bad.

i'm not sure what prompted it, but i stopped wearing my work shoes to work about a week and a half ago. i'm still wearing my $15 dr. scholl's insoles in them, but even after walking around for most of the weekend i've yet to suffer any of the excruciating pain i was becoming accustomed to.

not wanting to tempt fate, i'm calling it a "working theory" as opposed to "the reason why". the last thing i want is to get cocky and invite the pain back, especially now that's getting more like photowalking season outside. i always hate to be the one begging off because my feet start to hurt halfway through an outing.