Victoria! Canada’s great Mazatlan peninsula, home of the touristiest tourist traps in the country. At any rate, that was the mindset I got off the plane with, so the trip went just fine.

Practically the first thing I did was to drag my mother into the Victoria Bug Zoo, using the fairly simple logic that if she didn’t come with me she’d have to be (gasp!) alone for all of half an hour. Turned out I was glad that she’d come, because guess what? You can hold the bugs!! I had thought it was cool enough just going around photographing them in their little exhibits, but then the guide came by and said, “God, it’s so dead today. You want to hold any of the bugs?” (I responded to this with a girlish squeal that could probably be heard on the moon.)

Mom gamely photographed me holding some of the bugs, though a lot of the photos were blurred because she does kind of a weird thing when she presses down the shutter button and the camera usually follows a ‘U’ path before she gets the button all the way down.

Giant Stabbing Spike Insect From Australia: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Face-Munching Japanese Ninja Insect: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Thirteen-Inch Millipede: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Ridiculously Large Fuzzy Spider: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Enormous Prickly Thing With Face Like Alien from Men In Black: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!

(Two seconds after this photo was taken, the bug quite cheerfully took a junket up to my head and hung out there until the guide came back to pry him off. Mom was too busy going “Wow, look at that!” to either take a photo or get him off herself.)

Then, Mom much more willingly went to the Empress Hotel for afternoon tea. Apparently, the governor general was there having tea at the same time, but she had a private room (with a private band!) and we didn’t see her. I was too busy stuffing myself with tiny sandwiches and gourmet tea anyway.

The Royal BC Museum was pretty good, though I’m disappointed I didn’t get to see an IMAX film while I was there. (I think it was “Horrible Things From the Deep” or something like that.) Though, I did get to see my best friend’s mom in the gift shop. She caught me up on five years of gossip in something like ninety seconds, so I left her chatting with my mom while I canvassed the gift shop for souvenirs.

Humboldt Squid!!

We also went to the Butchart Gardens, though I couldn’t persuade Mom to go to the Butterfly Gardens nearby. No description of their shimmering loveliness and rare beauty could sway her steadfast determination to skip that particular tourist trap. “Oh, you’re from the tropics,” I said, fed up, “you probably saw all these butterflies every day.” “No,” she says, “I just don’t want to spend the twelve bucks.”

The Butchart Gardens were my favourite part of the trip and were almost as pretty as I remember them being as a kid, which is very impressive. (We were too early in the year for roses, though.) I took about a hundred photos between snatches of familiar dialogue:

Bee: Hello I am -
Me: AAAAAAAAAAA!!

(Naturally, the microsecond we left the gardens the sun came out. Grrr.)

We also did a harbour cruise on one of those little put-put ferries that goes about ten kph (Mom refused to even consider a whalewatching excursion). It wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour but I think we would have been better served by the butterfly gardens or the art gallery. Thank God I talked her out of the wax museum and Miniature World, anyway.

That thing is the Johnson Street Bridge, the raising and lowering of which is powered by a mere two 70-hp motors!

And that thing is the Gorge, where a lot of ocean has to fit through a very small space and the tidal action and the algae produces so much foam that sometimes the entire area is covered a couple of feet deep, apparently.

So yeah, fun trip; we did some shopping and went through Trounce Alley and Fan Tan Alley and bought tea at Silk Road and hung around in Market Square and Munro Books and ate approximately a metric ton of gelato. (Oh, and Mark, we also ate at Cafe Vieux Montreal twice. The herbed turkey sandwich is awesome. Why didn’t anyone tell me pea shoots were so delicious? I would now eat them on anything, up to and including lemon meringue pie.)

Anyway, the old lady is going in for major surgery on June 2nd, so if this happens to be my last trip with her I guess it’s a pretty good one; and I already know where I’m going to scatter her! We passed a sacred burial ground on the harbour cruise.

Me: If you die on the operating table, I’ll wrap your body in birchbark and put it out on that island.
Mom: What, and have those seagulls eating me? Absolutely not!
Me: What if I cremated you and scattered the ashes?
Mom: Well, that’s fine then. But isn’t it a sacred site?
Me: Yeah. Sacred for Indians.
Mom: But we’re not -
Me: Yes we are. Indians are Indians, don’t you worry.
Mom: Well if it doesn’t work out I’ll just come back and haunt you anyway.

Speaking of caterpillar shit, I’m headed to Victoria this Wednesday with my mother. Our last conversation didn’t bode at all well and went like this:

Me: “I marked up the AMA map with stuff we can do within walking distance of our hotel. The musem and art gallery are - ”

Mom: “Oh, I thought we could just sort of sleep in every day and do spa treatments for the rest of the day.”

Me: “For three days?!”

Mom: “Yes. Why, what did you have in mind?”

Me: “The Victoria Bug Zoo - ”

Mom: “Ugh. No. What do you think a vacation is for anyway?”

Apparently, it is for doing the exact same thing you’d do if you happened to have three days off at home. It appears I have been labouring under a misapprehension all my life.

Wish me luck.

(As I began scanning the pictures in for this post, I thought, “I am going to go to hell for #2.”)

Good show, everyone who entered! Although no one actually guessed the identities of the photographs, I did get a good laugh, and that’s all that matters.

All of the photos were scanned from the following book:

#1 was: STICK INSECT EGGS

#2 was: CATERPILLAR POOP

#3 was: MOTH EGGS

The reason I went from the book was to test your creativity and get some, y’know, cerebral juices flowing. (With that said, I did google stick insect eggs and butterfly eggs halfway through the contest and there are images of each here and here.)

Anyway, a prize obviously goes to Mr. M.H. Kelly for the best effort, most guesses, and only guess that made me laugh till I cramped; secondly, as mentioned, there is also a prize for first entrant (and therefore best sport), Corey. Well done, boys!

For more ‘What Is it’, I highly recommend the Neatorama collaboration with the What Is It Blog (not the original blog itself, which purports to give ‘clues’, and everyone knows ‘clues’ are for suckers). Though be warned, practically everything looks like a medieval testicle-torture device, even if it’s something as innocent as a coal-lifter.

Blogs! You love them, you hate them, you stay up late and self-abuse to them. Time for a change! Two-way interaction! The World of Tomorrow Today!! So I hereby announce the first ever Meticulous Vandalism What Is It? Contest!

Identify the items in the three close-up photographs below and you will win… err… (glances around distractedly)… some kind of awesome prize package whose components I haven’t yet purchased and assembled, but which I promise to consider whilst the contest is running.

Rules:
1. You are obviously allowed to use the interwebtubenets, but please reference your sources in your guess.
2. First person to guess all three items wins the awesome prize package.
3. Unlimited guesses are allowed.
4. If nobody guesses all three by, say, April 30th, two out of three wins a prize. Or one out of three… or whatever, whoever makes the best showing wins a prize.
5. The judges are myself and Ramon Hand, and we are both open to bribery.
6. If more than one person guesses the same item correctly, it goes to whoever got it first or whoever bribed the judges better.
7. Team entries are allowed, keeping in mind that you still only get one prize, you greedy buggers.
8. UPDATE: Sorry, I should have clarified. Either e-mail or comments are OK to submit your guesses. There may be a special prize for the first contestant (good job, Corey!).

So without further ado:

Image #1:

Image #2:

Image #3:

Good luck!

Whilst discussing a young man we both know, a friend told me tonight, “What’s the big deal? Why can’t you date him? You’re friends, after all. You’ve got common interests.”

Actually, we don’t. I have no idea at all why we’re friends. We don’t like any of the same things. The reason we’re friends is that we caught each other at a difficult and ugly period in our lives, and when the dust cleared we were each unavoidably part of the other’s infrastructure. Otherwise? Nothing.

That got me thinking about what does interest me, and whether that might be related to the fact that I have a really hard time making new friends. Well, let me qualify that - I have a really hard time being myself with people who don’t know me very well. Because we don’t…really… share that many interests.

Things That Interest Me

Beetles
Social insects
Sharks
All cephalopods but especially squid
Sailfish
Native mythology
Def Leppard
Dinosaurs
Folk stories
Russian idioms
Paleolithic megafauna
Spiders
Peak oil
Food writing
Obesity
The social model of disability
Hell
Early Christians
Gems and minerals (all types)
Victorian art
The Renaissance
Leonardo da Vinci
Bioremediation
Ancient Rome
Birds
Urban legends
Samurai (especially Samurai 7)
Bats
Mars (especially soil composition)
Sex
The Olympics
Cloning
High fashion, especially from Holt’s
Eugenics
Cults
Island biogeography
Cats
The CBC
Poisonous plants
Narcotics
Trephination
Robots
Conspiracy theory
Shackleton
Shakespeare
Polynesian exploration and history
Neodarwinism
Vinyl toys
Japanese ghosts
Realdolls
Zionism
Centralia, PA
Fluoride poisoning
Shonen ai
Piano rock
Ninjas
Fairy tales
Ireland

And that’s only a partial list, just off the top of my head. Dang. Seriously. No wonder people don’t talk to me at parties.

I am drowning again in some respulsive Disease. Unclean! Unclean! Plus also I am 26 and miss my mommy and it is very hard to be a big girl in the big city when you are lying around in Darth Maul boxers and a Mickey Mouse tanktop feeling sorry for yourself.

I will tell you this much, The Disease is throwing my weight loss for a loop. (Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t dare weigh myself because I’m sure there’s at least ten extra pounds of snot involved.) On Friday I went to the walk-in clinic because I was almost literally too ill to move. Those eight blocks took about half an hour, three times as long as normal. It turned out to be a serious, serious lung infection and they kept me there for half the morning while they did emergency X-rays and yelled at me for using Advil to self-treat. Oops. The doctor wanted to hospitalize me and put me on an antibiotic IV, but I balked and he finally gave up and put me on a really, really powerful antibiotic that I have to take four pills a day for a week. I took the first dose after games night on Friday (I figured the two adult beverages I had wouldn’t have any effect because it didn’t say anything on the info insert). Went to bed, slept about nine hours, so far so hoopy. Saturday was when the side effects started to kick in.

Holyshitmotherfuckingsonofamotherlessgoat.

One side effect both of the insane fever and the antibiotics (and, I presume, the ten pounds of snot) is nausea to a level I have never previously encountered. Seriously, this is what it must be like to have morning sickness when pregnant. I can’t eat anything I want to eat. Anything even remotely soft or textured or flavoured in any way activates my gag reflex. And I didn’t think I had a gag reflex! Once I swallowed a whole grape! I’ve nearly swallowed toothbrushes without gagging! (Note: not on purpose.)

I found this out the hard way with one spoonful of tomato soup that had me sprinting the, uh, six steps to my bathroom. (All right, it’s a small apartment.) Things that have proven OK: Golden Delicious apples, dry toast, unflavoured triscuits (rosemary and olive oil flavour NOT OK), dry crackers. Hot water with lemon. No tea. I can’t believe I’ve lived three days without tea. Even when I was staying with my uncle in the Guyana savannah studying fricking bullet ants, we had tea. (And centipedes, might I add. Tea and centipedes, that’s cool. I’m going to start a band and name it that.)

Here is the info insert for the fucking drug:

Pardon my mild and understandable annoyance, but WHO THE HELL DESIGNED AN ANTIBIOTIC THAT GIVES YOU HALLUCINATIONS?!

The reason I am posting is because yesterday after my second dose I actually did have a hallucination. And honestly, I’m fairly used to auditory and olfactory hallucinations, of which I’ve had quite a few over the past few years. They’re fine because you know you’re hallucinating and that takes away their power to scare me. Two examples:

1) I have a very, very, very common olfactory hallucination of gasoline. This came up once in an, um, intimate moment with my ex - who was as scrupulously clean as a cat and who would spend the entire day in the shower lathering and scrubbing if you let him, who always showered before dates and scrubbed out every nook and cranny. And I rolled over, sat up, and thought This is an olfactory hallucination but let’s just ask anyway, and said, “Did you fill up the truck today?” and he hadn’t. I pressed him for details on what else he’d been doing that day. It turned out he had stayed in and watched war documentaries. No gasoline at all.

2) (Slightly funnier) When The Hussy came to visit for the first time last year, we woke up on Sunday morning or whatever it was and I came out of the bedroom yawning and scratching my hair and he was already up and doing something on my computer. And I heard: “I AM THE GREAT GOD BAAL.”
I said, “What?”
BAAAAAAAAL.
He said, “What?”
I said, “Did you just say something?”
“No. I’m checking my Facebook!”
“Did you hear… the ceiling making any noises or anything?”
“No.”
“…Did your stomach just make a noise?”
He gave me a terribly pitying look and said, “Let’s just go out for breakfast, OK?”

But the hallucinations I got on this drug are completely beyond the pale. The dizziness and the nausea and the confusion and the disorientation and the persistent fever are tolerable. Barely tolerable.

After my first dose yesterday I started feeling dizzy and went to lie down on my futon and watch ‘Blue Planet,’ because David Attenborough is my go-to guy when I’m feeling really wretched. I had just gotten through ‘The Deep’ when the phone rang, and I had put the phone on the little side-table Lamo designed so I had it and my celphone within close reach because, hello lazy when I’m sick. I picked it up and saw the familiar ‘PARENTS’ on the orange call-display screen, and sat up, preparing my speech to tell my mother just how horrible I was feeling and that I had gone to the clinic like she said.

As soon as I sat up I was hit with a terrible wave of vertigo, sweat sprang to my forehead, and I stood up in preparation to run to the bathroom - but the phone was still ringing so I thought I’d just quickly pick it up and tell Mom that I was about to vomit like Regan Macneil and I’d call her back, so I pressed ‘talk’ and a stream of gibberish exited my mouth. Mom said, “Hello? Hello? Prem? Are you all right?” and I was trying to talk, trying to talk, nothing coming out but random burbling noises, and suddenly I lurched sideways and hit the carpet like a ton of bricks, knocking over one of my banana plants whose pot smashed to bits on its neighbouring pot. I lay there stupefied, blood trickling from a gash on my forearm where I’d put it down on a chunk of ceramic, terrified beyond words, still trying to talk to my mother - trying to scream for help and telling her that I’d just fallen and was lying on my scanner and a pile of paperbacks and I was bleeding and also I’d broken the pot that Dad brought for me when I moved in, sweating, on the verge of throwing up, watching the shining blood bubble and drip onto the carpet, and I said, “Oh fuck! My security deposit!” and she finally said, “Language!”

And then I was across the room, leaning on my world map. None of that happened. It was a hallucination. I was fine. The phone was back on the side table. I looked around, astonished, and saw that my balcony door was taped shut and it was snowing outside. The room was stiflingly hot so I went to the door and looked down. Chunks of green ceramic and the square block of the banana plant’s roots littered the ground and the spot of blood had changed from a circle to a triangle. I stared at it. I distinctly remember not only staring at it but the hairs on the back of my neck trying their damndest to stand up. It really did happen! It wasn’t a hallucination! I stepped carefully over the pieces and reached up as high as I could to grab the start of the tape strip, and pulled it down, and opened the balcony door to admit a welcome blast of cold air.

That didn’t happen either.

I taped up my balcony door in October. I untaped it in December. There was no tape. It didn’t happen.

When I ‘came to’ again I was standing in my hallway, staring at my dinosaur photos. This time it seemed to stick, the awakeness I mean, and I crept over to the computer desk and the balcony and my plants. They were perfectly intact, as was my arm. The balcony door was shut and locked. There was no blood on the carpet. No duct tape on the floor.

Mom called after dinner and the first thing I asked was whether she’d called earlier, because I thought perhaps a ringing phone really did become part of my hallucination, but she said, “No, we were on the south side all day. We ate paneer curry at Maurya Palace!” “Uh-huh,” I said. “Was Al home?” No, Al had spent the day at school working on some kind of plexiglass thing or something. “All day?” “Yes, all day. Why?”

Huh.

I should be contacting my doctor or something, but I am determined to stick out this drug. My lungs are seriously fucked up beyond the pale. I saw the X-rays. I’m coughing like a crazy old man who’s smoked for ninety years. This is the strongest antibiotic the doctor said he could give me without checking me into the hospital and I have to get rid of The Disease. But damn, it’s going to be a long week.

I thought the fever ‘broke’ like it does in the books, but it’s back with a VENGEANCE and I’m dripping with sweat sitting in front of an open window with a -5 breeze, but the fever does provide me with a jolly good excuse for the mildly insane act I just perpetrated, so now that that’s all done I am going to go do some Nyquil with an Advil chaser and when I wake up tomorrow I will put up a photo essay on SodaCraze because it goes with the theme.

The theme of crazy.

Speaking of genetics, my cousin just put up this photo of her little girl on FB with the caption “Jessie looks EXACTLY like Prem did at 20 months!”

Holy crap, she. totally. does. Same nose, same mouth, same eyes, same hair, same playing with our mothers’ glasses. This leads me to suspect that should I have a daughter, she will look exactly like that at 20 months too.

Wow. I’m still doing double-takes.

Oh my God, do I ever miss genetics. I found this list today (composed circa early 2000) and my heart shattered.

YOU MIGHT BE A FREAKY GENETIMATISTICIAN IF:

- You never swat a fly before checking its eyes and wings for new mutations
- You can spell the scientific name for yeast
- You can spell it backwards too
- Your favourite pickup line is “Let me take you back to my place and I’ll do your karyotype all night long”
- You have enough discarded Punnett squares to paper the Reichstagg
- You name your dog E. collie
- You drool when anyone mentions conjugation
- You are homozygous recessive at the weenie locus
- You make jokes about being homozygous recessive at the weenie locus
- You refer to a newlywed couple as ’stably base-paired’
- More than one guest at your house has been rushed to the ER after eating the little slab of blue Jell-O in your fridge
- You just thought ER stood for ‘endoplasmic reticulum’
- You refer to the male genitalia as the ’sex pilus’
- And to female genitalia as ’sticky ends’
- You can draw a Holliday junction with your eyes shut
- You have one tattooed on your ass-eye
- You call cigarettes ‘mutagen sticks’
- You call your beaded necklace your ‘plasmid’
- Of a Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western blot, you know which one doesn’t exist
- And what the other three are for
- And how to perform each
- You refer to your parents as ‘repressors’
- You invoke DNA evidence in an argument about literature
- You keep trying to ultracentrifuge your siblings in a cesium-chloride gradient to prove your hypothesis about which one is the most dense
- You’ve had wet dreams about Jacob and Monod
- You’ve done so many Southern blots that you no longer recoil at the suggestion of a probe
- You occasionally tell your hairdresser to ‘cleave a little off the 3′ end and supercoil the rest’
- You get way too excited when your dentist tells you about your plaque… because you want to examine its morphology
- You spent most of your formative years watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles not because they were ninjas or turtles but mutants
- And you went crazy trying to figure out what mutagens were in the ooze
- And you tried to use balancer chromosomes to create a pure-breeding ninja turtle

Goddammit. My glory days!

Last week, I felt a little off. All week I couldn’t write or draw or exercise or concentrate; I had to wind myself up like a toy for social events and the interview on Wednesday. This week I resolved to do better, I wanted a can-do attitude, I wanted to be practical and efficient and get! things! done! with exclamation marks because the things, they would be done so successfully that no one could do them ever again in the history of the world for fear of feeling inadequate compared to me. I started today with a really good to-do list.

I thought I’d begin with a workout. Whilst putting on my shorts, I lost my balance and crashed into my boombox (which, I should mention, still has a poltergeist in it and which was almost destroyed again a while back when I crashed into it doing a bellydancing DVD). That started things off with a huge bruise on my thigh. The fact that it is shaped somewhat like a face in profile isn’t as funny as I thought it would be because it hurts like an SOB.

Screw the workout, right? I peeled the bag of frozen Asian-style mixed vegetables off the bruise and decided to go downtown for the police records check I’ve been requested to complete before I go to the second interview. Police stations? Creepy. Lineups in police stations? Very creepy. The gibbering wacko in front of me who smelled like Doritos and armpits, who insisted on talking to me for the forty-minute wait despite the fact that I can’t understand questions like “Duh a fuh muh gih fluh fuh guh like guh?” and despite the fact that I was very ostentatiously listening to my MP3 player? Do I need to say it? After I got done there I could smell his secondhand reek on my coat as if he’d been spraying it from a bottle. Like Anti-Febreze.

But at least that was one thing accomplished. I decided to reward myself by buying lunch at the Vietnamese place in Bow Valley 3. “Numbah eleven!” Yeah yeah, number eleven. I took the little cup of spring-roll sauce, covered the noodles in all the condiments they had at the counter, grabbed a couple of napkins, closed the container… and fumbled it directly into my open purse.

Of course, my lunch upchucked all over everything and the little cup of spring-roll sauce, since the stuff has about the viscosity of water, burst like a balloon. So now no lunch, my celphone and MP3 player are soaked, my planner and wallet are dripping, the forms I needed to fax into Alberta Environment are illegible, the two DVDs I need to return to Blockbuster are stuck to the walls of the bag, my inhaler is clogged with fish sauce, my gloves are wadded balls of smelly cotton. The plastic-wrapped pack of Kleenex? Dry as a bone. And of course, since I finished Harry Harrison’s ‘Winter in Eden’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘King, Queen, Knave’ yesterday, my reading schedule is free and I had decided to start a new book today because I thought I might be stuck in line. So ‘Ender’s Game’? Soaked. (I’m so sorry, Corey. I will buy you a new copy tomorrow and I will be sure to get the same edition.)

I ate two tiny pieces of spring roll that had miraculously balanced on top of my wallet and went out onto 5th Ave to empty my rice-noodle-chili-and-vinegar-stinking purse into a garbagecan, hungry and cranky and honestly on the verge of tears. At home, I bucked up temporarily with some peanut-butter crackers, a Wagon Wheel, cuppa, and nap in that order. When I woke up I decided to go out for groceries because my fridge, come on, man cannot live by condiments and tea alone.

The walk to Safeway seemed to go all right, though I was staring suspiciously around myself the entire way. (Because on a day like today? Don’t turn your back on nothing.) I double-checked my eggs to make sure they were good ones. I fingered every single apple in the display. I stared down each aisle for thirty seconds just in case someone had spilled an invisible yet deadly pool of canola oil in which I might slip and die. And I had almost reached my apartment building when I realized that the coolness down my left pantsleg wasn’t caused by the wind. Yeah, the eggs were fine - but can you believe I picked up a fucking leaky milk. Brand-new jeans, dark wash. My sock had been dyed blue.

That was when things began to get funny again. Because as I was standing at my door jabbing my keys at the lock and cursing the icy milk dripping down my leg, I noticed that management had stuck a notice on the doorknob:

Haha! Hahahaha! Awesome! Well, that got me out of cleaning the tub, right? I have decided to spend Wednesday at Chinook - I think I’ll eat one of those huge sticky cinnamon buns at the food court, try on some makeup at Sephora, maybe watch ‘10,000 BC,’ go stroke the kittens at Petsmart. Ha! I could tell people I spent the day stuffing my face and playing with pussy. Radical. (I think I was getting a little hysterical.)

I dumped my wet jeans in the wash (no doubt staining everything else in the basket, I haven’t checked yet) and cobbled together a kind of spinach-eggs-cheese quiche thing for supper, which was seriously the high point of the day (I actually photographed it). After supper I decided to make sugar cookies using the frozen dough I had thriftily set aside from my Christmas baking. Hey, guess what? If you wrap your dough in clingwrap rather than foil, it may pick up undesirable flavours from other items in the freezer! I guess I need to watch more Martha Stewart! I bet she covers that in a couple of shows! Hahaha!

As you can tell, the baked cookies tasted like vanilla and salmon.

I had to throw them out.

That was about an hour ago. I have no idea what else can go wrong in the eight minutes left today, but maybe if I stay very still here in front of the computer, singing quietly along to the Rolling Stones and quietly drinking water and composing tomorrow’s to-do list, maybe, just maybe I can escape the notice of whatever malevolent god I pissed off. Or maybe I’m pissing him off just by sitting here and in two seconds I’m going to spill water into my keyboard. Oh bloody Christ. I’m going to bed. I hope I don’t fall in the shower and fracture my skull.