underpaid

i intended to blog last night, but instead when i got home from work i went straight past the computer, put every stitch of clothing i was wearing in the laundry, and had a painfully hot bath.

let me tell you about my evening.

i work for an agency that staffs the homes of people with intellectual disabilities. they frequently have other disabilities, too. the agency keeps sending me into homes that i haven't been trained in, where i can sink or swim. i'm not a huge fan of that practice.

last night i was in a home i'd never been in. two elderly, deaf women lived there. during dinner, loud, ominous noises came from one woman's rear end. scary noises. later i got to see the result of the noises. all over the bathroom floor. the linen closet was devoid of towels and there were only four squares of paper towel to be found in the whole house. on top of that, i couldn't find the surgical gloves. and this was a serious puddle. the light brown fluid had spread out all over the floor. i was barefoot and it soaked into the crevices in between my toes. the bottoms of my pants wicked it up. as i cleaned it up (with my bare hands) the cuff of my shirt dipped into it. i was a human shit sponge.

as i was cleaning the woman was sitting in a bath, theoretically to get clean. the water was brown with stuff floating in it. she couldn't stand in order to shower, so this was the best we could do. freaking gross. when she was ready to get out i rushed all over the house, searching for a towel. nope. she waited in the tub while i looked, screaming at me that she was getting cold, and what's the holdup?

i eventually found a towel. they were in a closed cardboard box in the back of a closet.

seriously, folks. i am very, very underpaid.

the plant speaks

i was just talking with one of my tomato plants, and i thought i'd transcribe the conversation for you here. the plant, of course, is called tom.tom: please let me go outside.
me: no.
tom: but look out there! things are green! and i'm big and need to live out there!
me: not until this shitty weather ends.
tom: but i love shit! i thrive in shit, literally!
me: that was a poor choice of words, sorry. you can't go outside until the unseasonably cold weather ends. i don't want you to get snowed on.
tom: *grunts sadly*

seriously. we had snow last friday. tonight it's going down to freezing. tuesday, wednesday and thursday nights it will get below freezing. what the hell is this?
this past weekend was may long, here on the canadian prairie. it's typically the weekend when every gardener is out there planting and watering and trimming and generally getting gleeful over the coming summer. but not this weekend. i didn't see anyone working in their yards when i was out on sunday. it's unnatural. it sucks. i don't like it.but tom doesn't like it even more than me.

a dork in love

i'm not into science. believe me, it's at the bottom of my list of interests, generally. i'm not particularly fascinated by genetics. or old japanese men. or german monks, especially ones that have been dead for 125 years. and normally gardeners don't give me the hots, although i'm sure there are exceptions.

so why do i have crushes on these men?

this is david suzuki. every canadian knows of him, most revere him. he's an environmental activist. also a geneticist. and he likes gardens a great deal.
and this is gregor mendel. 'the father of genetics'. he's known for fiddling around in the gardens in the abbey where he was a monk, figuring out the natural laws that govern trait inheritance. so what's with this? is it the glasses? the thin lips? the appearance of intelligence, kindness and serious hotness?

don't tell anyone, ok? i don't want to be known as that chick with the thing for geneticists who garden. although i might be. but shush.

pardon me while i uncross my eyes

did you know that human physical characteristics, as those of other organisms, are predominantly determined by the protein composition of body cells and tissues and enzymes and other secretions that they produce? or that if we consider all 23 chromosome pairs and the further complications of recombination during meiosis, we can predict that one individual can generate thousands of different combinations?

i didn't.

did you care?

i don't.

i remember liking the elegant logic of mendel and his peas when i was in high school. crossbreeding green and yellow peas, seeing what colour their offspring would be - it was straightforward and, to my mind, interesting. but protein synthesis, alleles, amino acids? no thanks. ugh.

the kicker is that this is all for my anthropology class. physical anthropology, though. i don't get to take cultural anthro until i finish this class. it's like the university is trying to scare people away from an interesting subject by making the intro class as tedious as possible. i'd much rather be flipping through old national geographics, looking for saggy-breasted women to make collages with. i'll do that another semester, i guess.

tonight i'll read another chapter from that godawful text, tomorrow after work i'll read one more then write a paper on all of it while it's still fresh in my mind. then i need to read two chapters from my counselling text (less dry, but very repetitive) and write something on them. it's a good thing that i have no work or kids on monday. i guess.

geez.

back on the bandwagon

for almost two months i've cruelly neglected this blog. i'm sorry. i'll try not to do it again.

the blog isn't the only thing that's been languishing in the bitter winter of my inattention. apparently blogging, picturetaking and knitting are linked in my life. i know this now because i haven't done any in any signifigant way since early april. before i was knitting a pair of socks a month, taking a zillion pictures and blogging almost daily. these days i've been doing schoolwork, earning a living, keeping up with housework, reading, walking, lots of stuff, but no knitting, photography or blogging. is it too late to start again? can you forgive me?

i hope not.

so anyways, i made this sock in april:and since its completion at the end of april i've knit about two inches of its pair. i suck. but the sock (a modification of the nutkin pattern) is slow, painful knitting. it looks cool, but is not worth it. and i feel that this design would look better as fingerless gloves, with a longish arm part. i may make that one day.and i don't like the yarn as much in sock form as in skein form. alas. it just sort of looks like a messy pile of colours here, instead of something beautiful and subtle.

this is my front door, as seen from inside the house. can you see it? i noticed the other night that the words 'men's toilet' are on the door, but painted over. my jiffy markers and i are renewing the letters. i do one letter for every chapter of my text that i read and write notes on. it's slow going, but filling in the letters is actually a good break from the mental strain of memorizing page after page of dry information. i'm hoping to have all of the 'men's' filled in by bedtime. we'll see, since the kids are getting ornery from all the inattention they've recieved today. i might need to actually aknowledge them and, you know, feed them or something, at some point. sooner or later.

i'll try to blog again tomorrow.

quickie

hey, just stopping in to say hi. i just finished writing 15 pages of homework for one of my classes so my brain is fried. i'm going to go home and not think at all until tomorrow.

things are going well. i officially have two jobs now, although neither is giving me any hours at the moment. i'm told that will change soon. my tomato seedlings are gearing up to go in the ground, school is fine, and tonight i'm going to make fried rice for my dinner. tomorrow i hope to buy a laptop, but it depends. i keep emailing and calling about laptops i find for sale online and things keep not working out. yesterday i spent ages waiting around a burger joint for a guy to show up, and he never did. as we waited my kids ate their weight in fries. i've learned that trying to get an affordable used laptop with two little kids in tow, riding the bus, sucks. seriously. ugh. but eventually i'll have one and i'll be able to start blogging again.

anyways, internet, i love you and miss you like crazy. i hope to see you again soon.

movie review: lars and the real girl

this is the story of lars. he's a sweet, reclusive man who lives in his brother's garage and does whatever it takes to avoid human interaction. he develops a delusion wherein he believes that his new 'real girl' doll, a life-sized, highly detailed sex doll, is an actual person. his brother and sister in law freak right out, unsurprisingly, but the witty, wise, beautiful family doctor/ shrink (!?!?!?) tells them to play along with it. lars brings his 'girlfriend' to church, an office party, his childhood haunts, etc.


most of the acting is excellent (although bianca, lars' 'girlfriend' is a little stiff.... *giggle* *snort*) the setting is perfect and the story is both sweet and interesting.


i do, however, have a couple of problems with the film.


it's the job of filmmakers to construct a scenario and the job of an audience to believe it's real. when the filmmakers do their job right (the truman show or et, for example) the audience easily believes a fairly ridiculous situation to be real. it's called suspension of disbelief. i had a hard time suspending my disbelief while watching this film. the people are too good. a gentle, lonely man goes crazy and carries an anatomically correct, well endowed doll around with him, talking to him. everyone he encounters looks at him askance for about three seconds and then plunges headlong into pretending it's normal. a whole midwestern small town cheerfully goes along with the ruse, even forming emotional attachments to the inanimate object. if just a few people had persisted in finding the whole thing ludicrous the movie would have worked for me. but a whole town commiting to helping out a man with a mental problem? the stereotype sticks in my throat. the actors may as well have worn placards that said 'this is a small town in the midwest and 'round here we support each other and stick together, goll'durn it!'


my other issue is the way the movie repeatedly opens potentially interesting cans of worms and then abandons them. lars' horror of physical contact, his terror when confronted with the idea of childbirth, his desire for a rite of passage, his relationships with his brother, sister in law, doctor and the cute girl at work... i understand that there isn't time in the movie to really delve into multiple complex subjects, but rushing past all these topics was annoying and frustrating.


all in all, this movie was ok. it had huge potential and failed to live up to it, but it wasn't terrible.

book review: fool

forgive the lack of links, i'm posting from the library where i can only have one window open at a time, and the internet is slower than a slug in molasses. ugh


i'm a longtime christopher moore fan, but his last few books have caused my faith in him to falter. fool, moore's interpretation of shakespeare's king lear, follows in the unfortunate recent tradition of mediocre books. you suck and a dirty job were
sort of funny, i guess. fool isn't as funny as them. it's not that moore isn't trying. he is obviously trying very, very hard. he just seems to have lost the spark
that made coyote blue, fluke and lamb three of my favourite books, both in terms
of hilarity and interesting treatment of an interesting subject.

when writing fool christopher mooreseems to have reverted to his 13 year old self. in a random sampling of 5 pages (16, 63, 98, 150, 199) i found:
sexual/ bodily function jokes/ mentions: 13
religion jokes: 2
other jokes (mostly monty python-type humour) : 4
3/4 of these were jokes were in the first two pages. even the author, it seems, got tired of the juvenile humour.

shakespeare's king lear is complicated enough without a bunch of 'funny' extra scenes and scenarios added in. the book is a confusing mishmash of historical periods, shakespeare quotes, (from his collected works, not just lear) comedic embellishments and added plot twists for the sake of added plot twists.

while reading fool i probably chuckled aloud five or six times, a pitifully small amount considering the book is 311 pages long. i had been hoping that this would be the book where christopher moore shook off his current slump and resumed his former brilliance, but alas, no. please try again, mr. moore.

book review: house rules

house rules by rachel sontag is a phenomenon. it's the autobiography of a young woman. more specifically, it's a memoir focused on sontag's family relationships.
one could say that this is yet another voice from the world of white, middle class girls claiming hurt because daddy didn't understand them and never really loved them. however, that would be neither accurate nor fair. yes, many parts of this tale fit the cliches, but the author's father was exceptionally cruel and controlling. her mother was exceptionally self-deluded and impotent. most importantly, the author herself is exceptionally skilled as a writer. her story is told as simply as possible, given the complex nature of familial relationships. i highly recommend this insightful, truthful, beautiful and heartbreaking book.

book review: oryx and crake

last night on the airplane i finished reading oryx and crake by margaret atwood. i was sad to see it end.

margaret atwood is a blatantly brilliant canadian author. her the handmaid's tale is her most famous book, but she has written a veritable library. her work is usually dark and visionary. oryx and crake is no exception.

i believe that atwood was trying to write a book that would belong on the shelf next to brave new world and 1984 when she wrote oryx and crake. her book shares their tone and vision, but her book is not quite as chilling as the others. on the other hand, i found oryx and crake to be more readable, with better characters. i'm actually quite torn when it comes to deciding if oryx & crake is on par with the other two books or if it falls slightly short. i couldn't tell you. you should read it yourself and let me know.