[7.8.2001]

Wherein I Am Less Angry and Hence, Probably Mind-Numbingly Dull
So Deal With It

wow, i post a couple of weird blogs and all the sudden everyone's convinced i'm perched over my sink with a razor blade ready to carve the magna carta in my wrist at any moment. i do appreciate the concern, honest. and to everyone who was wondering, i'm fine. i swear. the crack about hitting rock bottom was just that-- a crack. nothing intended by it. no hidden hollie meaning (for once). i thought the candy bar thing was amusing, but apparently it is a sign of my ultimate mental degradation or something. i'm sorry, guys. i just really don't like disneyland and i can't hide it anymore.

now back to your regularly scheduled rantfest.

actually, today i feel less like spewing my unique brand of piss and vinegar all over this page and more like talking about sappy church crap and stuff. for those of you who didn't frantically click your back button after that sentence, you get a melted orange popscicle as a token of my esteem. anyway, friday a pastor at my church and her husband invited me to dinner, which i tried not to think too much about beforehand. c'mon, you gotta admit that it's a little weird having a pastor randomly call you up and ask you, JUST YOU, over to their house to "talk". i figured i was in trouble. but i wasn't-- we just hung out and watched the simpsons and ate on their livingroom floor (they'd just moved in) and had coffee at a trendy place downtown and took a long drive up into the old industrial part of our fair city. we talked about serious shit, which was okay. made my head spin a little, but at least it kicked me out of this self-absorbed stew i've been sitting in lately. there is a point to this story, i swear. anyway, i saw them today before church and was pulled aside.

"i heard you singing on friday," one of them said. "and we want you to sing and help lead a new worship team." where i go to church, "worship team" is code for "the people who get up on stage during the worship portion of the service and, via music, rile everyone into a pile of frothing god freaks."

i was instantly struck by a couple things. first, wow! they heard me singing! ME! SINGING! and they liked it enough to ask me to get up in front of our church and do it! that's neato! secondly, white hot terror. i can sing, yes, but i have never been what you would call "formally trained". i've never sang in front of other people who are staring at me and waiting for me to, i dunno, move them or something. i'm scared, but at the same time this has been something on my heart for a good long while now. i worship through singing-- it gets so loud during our services that "singing" can often mean screaming or moaning or chanting or crying. no, it's not speaking in tongues. feh. it's just... exuberant expression through song.

you know, there's no way in hell this is going to come off as anything other than my ranting and raving about THE LOR-DUH and snake-handing and speakin' in tongues whilst wearing a cracklingly-starched floral pink church dress with white heels and "nude" coloured tights. i never, ever talk about this with anyone, so please try to be good and forgive my lack of adequate vocabulary. imagine that what i'm talking about isn't a typical church sorta thing, because i don't think i'm going to be able to find the words to get my point across as i'd like. and i hate nude tights.

anyway.

so i'm gonna give it a shot. singing. in front of people. leading the worship at my weirdo little church. all i can really say at this point about that is, "huh!"

again, i'm okay. really. stuff's weird right now, but in my own special kinda way, i like it. change is nice. bunnies are soft. doritos are salty. you get my drift.

Hollie | 16:03

[7.6.2001]

Isn't It Cool
by hollie

isn't it cool when you get a candy bar out of the vending machine and the wrapper is screaming that you now have a chance at winning your very own little trip to disneyland, and when you think about actually winning you just don't care? like you don't give a flying fuck about goddamned disneyland?

i dunno, but to me it would seem that this is signalling that one has hit a new high in one's life. and by "high", i mean "dizzyingly rock bottom low".

FIN.

p.s. from my site logs i see that someone from stream has been poking around here. i don't really have a reason why, but that makes me irrationally uncomfortable. if you happen to be from stream, please reconsider coming back. thanks and lots o' love and hugs 'n kisses and all that shit, your host.

Hollie | 16:22

[7.4.2001]

it's like the goddamned world is ending*

leave it to me to be sitting in my bedroom typing away like a freak on the 4th of july. nonono, don't get me wrong-- i went out and did stuff all day, honest. but it's dark now and, being that i live smackdab in the middle of a somewhat major metropolitain area, my walls and windows and shelved earthly belongings are all currently being treated to a good rattling by the 689 local firework displays. i wish i could muster up enough interest in pointless explosions to wander out into my yard and watch, but i'm just not that kind of gal. 27 years of this holiday and i'm pretty sure i know what a sparkler looks like.

why so bitter on this, the holiday celebrating our great nation's independance? eh, i dunno. i don't know what to do with myself lately, so i default to mindless ranting to make it seem like i have a point. i guess i'm just sorta suspended between my usual mania-inspired level of life and this new, strange sense of distraction, longing, confusion. lately i find myself staring, slack-jawed and glaze-eyed at nothing, consumed with thought. i wake up in the middle of the night and lie there staring at the blurry, dim light on the wall coming in from the street, listening to the drunken people stumbling their way out of the bar across the street into their cars and swerving away, and i can't shut my mind off. images and imagined sensations and words fly through my mind, repeating obsessively like the background of an old cartoon. i ride the damnable bus to and from work, bent into a defeated posture, staring out the window as my city passes by not knowing that i feel trapped by its familiarity. and i can't help but be changed by this.

i mean, i'm still me at my core-- i still drink juice like it's going out of style and choke on it because i always drink it too fast. my hair is still all weird and unruly. i still curse and laugh too loudly and talk too much. i still like unix. but something has changed lately. something in the texure of my mind is not the same and i wonder at times if it ever will be again. i mean sure, i'm a big believer in the principle that the only constant in life is change, but what i'm getting at in my roundabout way is that things going on right now are changing the way i see everything. i'm rethinking myself and my life. as a result, i feel like an observer in my everyday doings. i'm autopiloting along doing what i know because i'm not sure what else to do. and why?

because i fell in love. i don't do that very often, and in fact, haven't for a few years now. i'd put my silly little heart in a tupperware bowl and stuck it in the back of a kitchen cabinet for later use. but someone managed to find that sucker and stick it in the toaster. christ, what a stupid analogy. but anyway, stupid analogies aside, when i do fall in love in the way i recently have-- quietly, deeply, and in a startlingly real way-- it's almost always with someone accessible. it's always someone who lives less than a day's drive away and who can reciprocate and who i can ride off into the sunset with in his honda civic, eating french fries and singing along to his phish live 2 CD set. but since i obviously don't want to ride off happily in another honda civic, this time i've cleverly opted to fall in love with someone i can never have. someone i cannot and will never name here. the hardest part of all of this isn't really that i can never be with this person, as every fiber of my being yearns to, but that this person is what i would call a kindred spirit. a soulmate. a whathaveyou. if i just thought this person was kinda nice and cute and they made me giggle once in a while, i might have an easier time letting go and getting on with my life. but this... this is something else. something i'm not sure i even understand, but that leaves me completely dumbfounded for lack of a better reaction. i mean, don't get me wrong-- there is always something oddly beautiful about wanting someone so badly that one's chest physically aches, but knowing that i just have to wait for that ache to get bored and go away don't help none. i'm trying to maintain a sense of humour about it all, but i'd be lying if i said it wasn't consuming me quite completely. "yeahyeah, hollie," you're snorting. "shut the fuck up. you're yammering on like someone named Cherry who thinks the world begins and ends in the parking lot of arby's." dude, you're so right. and i know it. i know how fucking cliched and empty this all sounds, like i'm making it up just to rile my readers and get loads of email telling me how trite i sound and that you're never coming back here. and if you wanna do that, that's cool with me.

just tell me what the hell to do before you go. please.

*because of the fireworks. not because of the stuff i talk about in this entry.

Hollie | 22:50

[7.3.2001]

Dispatch from the Frozen North

Ok I am at work. I am bored. I have decided to write a treatise entitled "On the Weather in Peterborough and How it is Affected by the Lake Effect and General Weirdness", or "What the ?#@$% is Happening this Summer". My favourite American yarnhead Hollie can attest to the fact that in Canader it gets freakishly cold in the winter from her first little flitting about to my dear country. Now I must digress a bit and admit that I do kind of like it when it gets to be -40 (where our two lovely scales of temperature measurement join back together into a single unit so I don't have to demonstrate my knowledge of the Joyous Metric Celsius and Dinosaur Imperial Farenheit and how they compare to each other) because it gets so cold that it feels dangerous. We like this. It makes us feel superior to the majority of Americans, even though we are too polite to admit it. Like your "Storm of the Century" last century where you had a total of 5 flakes of snow in South Carolina that precipitated a mass buyout of Rubber Boots (rubber boots in snow? are you nuts?!!!) and we were all laughing and grabbing the shovels and enjoying the mass panic because this was a normal little sputter of a storm and meant big snowforts for the kiddies and maybe a nice snowday and gee! we can get the Skidoos out and go for a tear in the bush! and feel all smug because we weren't panicking over nothing and driving like idiots.

Now, I am talking here really about the weather outside of Ottawa (our shining nation's capital), specifically Almonte, the teeny little town in the middle of the Ottawa Valley (yes I am a Valley girl!) where it gets so cold that your ears are frizzled in 2 seconds flat, frozen so solid you are afraid they will break off from your head if you bend them like your wet hair which broke off in your hand on the way to school because you were late and ran out the door with a wet head and no hat because you have to be cool of course because this is when you are young and things like self image are a mountain compared to the infinitesimal mote of a nascent practical nature. (it does develop eventually, evolution looks out for her own)

Ok. Anyhow, when Hollie winged (wung?) her way back to Canader for the occasion of my wedding (she really just came back for the poutine) she noticed something different. Namely, it was hot. Not just hot, it was blistering hot and humid. You see, we have something called Wind Chill that we love to talk about in the winter. You see it is a great social occasion to cluster around the flickering television and hear these impossibly low temperatures being bandied about. We not only love to hear how cold it is (and thus how strong we are for dealing with it) we like to add on an extra bit of coldness by measuring how cold it FEELS outside by adding on the coldness generated by the wind. So you'll get a -20C temperature (-4F for you americans) but with windchill it is -35C!!! (-31F). I do have a point to this, bear with me.

We not only like to do this in the winter time, but we have something called the Humidex which is like the summer windchill. It gets darn hot here in the summer, and very humid. So when Hollie arrived, it was 28C (82.4F) but with the Humidex (HUMIDity IndEX - but Humidex sounds cooler - say it - Huuuumidex) it was really 36C (96.8F). We like torturing ourselves with the weather. It is one of our favourite topics. Not only do we get incredibly cold in the winter, it is balanced out with incredible hotness in the summer. Bandying about Windchill and Humidex are the mainstays of our culture.

Now, in Peterborough, the Peter-patch, place of my abode, all bets on the weather are off. Growing up in Almonte, there are a few golden constants in life. One, winter lasts from October to April (sometimes May), it gets cold and stays cold and there are liberal sprinklings of snow in there. Two, summer starts in June and is broiling until August. Peterborough (and London too) on the other hand is/are MESSED UP.

Winter in Peterborough is an endless round of surprises. Will it rain today? or snow? Will it suddenly freakishly be 15C (59F) when it should be -20C (-4F)? Summer has been more of the same. on Friday, it was 38C (100.4F) with Humidex. Sunday, it was 9C (48.2F). Does this sound a leeeetle wrong to you? today it is more of the same. I am swathed in about 5 layers, shivering away at my keyboard in an airconditioned office that is WARMER than it is outside at the moment. This is WRONG. I need me some fingerless gloves like Bob Cratchit or whatever the heck his name was in that Dickens' book.

All this is due to something called the Lake Effect. Basically there are 5 (I think --- ummm.....yeah Ontario, Superior, Erie, Huron, Michigan) big ol' Lakes smacked down in the the middle of the country here and all this water has a weird effect on the weather. Very weird effects and I don't like it. This has no point except that I am bored and if I drink any more tea to warm up I shall explode into a new lake right here on the floor. End of science lesson.

Thank you.

Kate | 08:50