PipesDreams

Made it to Vancouver in one piece, very sleepy but okay.

It’s a good thing and I have a solid relationship based on shared blood because today has tested the things we can do together and still “have fun”.

When I arrived, Keira decided we needed to go to the mall. According to her, our reasons for going to the mall were threefold: find a jaunty chapeau, get some jean-skirt friendly shoes and visit EB Games for some new PS2 entertainment. As you can see, we had a packed agenda.

I openly loathe malls. Loathe them. I would rather bathe myself in acid than go to a mall on an average day. But Keira is my cousin and I love her, and since I’d just forcibly added her to Facebook against her will, I decided to play nice and we went to the mall. We had a reasonably good time and bought Keira a smokin’ hot turquoise bikini that she looks like a Bond girl in.

We also invested in 4 videogames, matching monkey-print pyjamas, a classy 8-pack of beer and a bag of Smartfood with the plan of beating the 890mm of rain bucketing down on Vancouver with a girls night in. This plan encountered some difficulties.

Problem 1: Keira hates my taste in videogames. Katamari Damacy? Hated it.
Problem 2: Keira has only one functioning PS2 controller. The “guest” controller was broken.
Problem 3: Keira saw someone on TV eat a candy apple, and suffered an incapacitating attack of “want, take, have”.

Ergo, we RETURNED to the mall. The same mall. In Richmond. Again. Twice in one day. The man at Purdy’s said they had no candy apples, so K. sated her sweet tooth with a freakish concoction from Dairy Queen involving soft ice cream, blue raspberry sauce and slushie juice. She instantly regretted it.

We called it a day and returned home, where Keira decided she had found the solution to our lack of entertainment. Beer + Miss USA 2007! In her mind, this equation ended in FUN. I’m not very good at math, but to me, it equalled DISASTER. When I voiced this unpopular opinion, Keira’s immediate response, and I’m quoting directly here, was: “Listen, you be quiet or I’ll take you back to the mall!”

If that isn’t proof that my beloved cousin has been temporarily possessed by Satan, allow me to offer the following exchange as further evidence:

Keira: (watching Miss USA 2007) “I can’t believe you aren’t enjoying this with me.”
Moira: (typing this entry at the computer) “Oh, can’t you?”
Keira: “Ewww! Missouri is walking like she’s sucking in EVERYTHING. Gross! Look. LOOK AT THE TV.”
Moira: “Please don’t make me. It hurts.”
Keira: “Oh my god, you have to look at this dress. It’s like a bubblegum puked all over her!”
Moira: “Do you realise what you just said? I’d read it back to you but I think it will be more fun when you read this tomorrow.”
Keira: “You’re sleeping on the deck tonight. And we’re going back to the mall.”

So far, Keira refuses to change the channel, even though she knows I’m mocking her publicly for it. We’re down to the final five contestants: Nevada (bubblegum puke lady), Tennessee (Keira thinks she’ll win), Kansas (I think she’ll win because she loves the baby Jesus), Rhode Island and California. I’m going to shoot myself in the head before I find out who the winner is, so this will be my last LJ entry and I hope you enjoyed it.

Last night I was supposed to go see a delightful zombie movie with Alastair, but got hit by a sudden Attack of Ferociously Antisocial Behaviour, and remained at home to enjoy a solitary “graphic” themed evening.

I spent an hour drooling over graphic t-shirts at Threadless.com. Naturally, being a woman of large and intemperate desires, I want all of them, but I felt particularly drawn to the two that involved astronauts: the one with the funkadelic boombox-toting moonwalker, and the one with the the ‘Madness of Mission 6’ dude freaking out at psychedelic visions of zombie spacemen.

“In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone on ‘Mission Six’ to an orbiting space station to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed its four crewmen. By the third day, Peckmann’s broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He said that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him. The station was allowed to drift out of orbit and into space; a failure never to be mentioned again.”

After that it was graphic novel o’clock, so I settled down with a nice cup of Ovaltine and Daniel Clowes’ ‘David Boring’. I wasn’t sure how this book would strike me. I loved ‘Twentieth-Century Eightball’, but was strangely unmoved by ‘Ghost World’, so it was a 50/50 split with his work to date. The art, as usual, was stunning. Sharp, high contrast inks with an immaculately tapered line. Characters with unique, individual features and perfectly captured emotions. Illuminating background touches (graffiti: “the end is nigh”, storefront: Divorce Attorney), as you’d find in the panels of ‘Watchmen’. And in the end, the protagonist’s name could not be further from the truth. Mr. Boring’s story is about sex, murder, lesbians, incest, cop killers, the apocalypse and a lucky penny – there’s nothing boring about it. There is a claustrophobic repetition of mistakes and that oppressive sense of a tightening noose from which there’s no escape, but it’s a thrilling inevitability of doom, much like in the best Hitchcock films. For those of you who are into deadly bacteria, or who have had recent brushes with misery due to dreadful colds (? ?) our unlikely hero’s obsession with invisible things that can kill you will be a nice counterpoint to augment your reading enjoyment. For the nautical-minded, or even someone who just likes sailors (? ?), there are lone survivors breaking social taboos at sea (reminding me of ‘Goodbye, Chunky Rice’, weirdly). Personally, I loved it. Highly recommended for a day when you are ready to embrace the sour possibility that the course of true love will never, ever run smoothly enough for you to stop being alone alone alone.

Daniel’s vivid and morbidly sex-obsessed imagination seems to have rubbed off on me a little. While standing on the crowded subway platform this morning, I closed my eyes and envisioned the men who brushed past me at close range, turning their heads slightly to kiss me. Remember that scene in ‘Empire Records’ where the girl is grooving with her eyes shut and headphones on, doing strange ballet moves to the music, and Mark is sweeping the floor and he closes his eyes and leans in to kiss her, and then she opens her eyes at the last second? Kind of like that. Welcome to my brain.

I dressed in a spectacularly unprofessional manner for work today: striped brown, lime green, red, pink, turquoise and mustard tights with a red skirt and chocolate brown princess-sleeved shirt. I caught my reflection in the elevator mirror. Standing next to all the lawyers in their charcoal grey and black suits, I look ludicrous.

In deference to my recent graphic novel experience, I will take a moment to enable any stalkers I may have accrued on the west coast by informing them of my exact whereabouts from 8:30am until 10:30am this Sunday, March 25. I will be moving along the following 16km route, 8km out, turn, then 8km back, at a pace of 7mins16sec per kilometer.

Bring your binoculars and telephoto lenses. Pants optional.