Things I hate:

Spelling errors in books. Finding an egregious error near the beginning of a book can turn me off of the rest of the book, making me a hardened, suspicious and critical reader for the rest of it. A spelling error near the end of a book that I really like is alarming, a fly in the ointment. If it's an exceptionally good book, I can almost forgive an error, with a great effort of wilful magnanimity.

As long as the error is not "disorientated", with is never, ever forgivable, and in my opinion should earn the ersatz author a life sentence without parole in a room of people scratching blackboards.

Recent errors I found in books include someone "taking the reigns" (EEeeeeee!), and "swop", rather than the correct "swap"
(Aieeee!). All it takes is a decent editor. For mistakes to appear in print means at least 3 people have read it and not twigged on it. Ouch.

I freely admit that I make spelling errors, especially since I write at speed, don't reread, and don't have an editor, but I usually pick them out later if I ever reread my entries, and then I wince and flush with shame, as I should.

Flour. Flour is the devil's head lice. I intend to never eat anything made with flour again, unless forced to accept some bread offered at a dinner party with good will. I am exceedingly grateful to whoever has contributed to loaves of bread made without flour being available at all major grocery stores.

Too small glasses and cups. I'd rather resort to a yogourt bucket than waste my time with a dainty teacup or sippy water glass that holds maybe a paltry 200ml. What is a beverage that size good for, unless it's alcoholic? Might get your esophagus damp. My ideal size is about 3/4 of a litre. Enough to quench thirst, enough for a vat of tea that you can coddle for a decent interval without cooling too fast, and worth the time it takes to mix a drink in. You don't have to go back for refills.

Phantom bras. It's bad enough wearing underwire against your skin all day, but when you take them off and still feel the constricting pressure, that's not good.

Non-consensual sex in porn. Or more specifically, porn where the woman is not experiencing pleasure, although she may have in fact agreed to whatever is being done to her. Unfortunately, that's most of porn, as far as I've seen.

This is the biggest crime perpetrated on our culture after circumcision, I think. After sustaining that disgusting infant sexual mutilation, our men grow up haphazardly learning about sex acts from porn that consistently misrepresents the female experience and usually doesn't show any genuine female pleasure at all.

It's no fucking wonder rape happens, let alone the way many/most well-meaning guys have no idea what a woman's pleasure looks like, let alone how to participate in it, and have set their neurons for their own pleasure out of images of lies and cruelty.

Finally, I have a crush! Almost a year together and I've never had the least interest in anyone else, I was starting to think I was ill.

This is one of those little crushes that makes me a little breathless while he's around, but has no substance and I know I'll forget him completely after our lives no longer intersect. Just because of his dark hair and eyes and sweet shyness and the veins leaping out of his hardworking arms. Yum.

And because I know he's one of those guys who genuinely likes me. He's never seen anything like me, and he's sold. Not scared, not intimidated, just knows, now, that he wants a chick like me. It's intoxicating to be that girl, the first girl a guy meets who's tough, hardworking, solid, strong, and still all girl. He watches me, impressed, thrilled, and unafraid to show his admiration. I love guys like that. I'm with one.

I'm simultaneously super in love with C and enamoured of his arms too. It's like crushes don't detract, but amplify.

If I were single we'd be all over each other like rocks and waves.

Very fun to be female in a male-dominated field. Just bathing in the general atmosphere of curiousity and desire, like a lightning rod for everyone's focus and projections. Super fun. Unbelievable how comfortable I am being the only person out of 30 with double-X chromosomes, for 12 hours a day.

I'm dreaming of him, dreaming of saving his life. He leaps to grab my hands as I lean over some rail, and with time, great strain and difficulty, I haul him over the rail to safety. We wordlessly hug, then flee together. C is there the whole time, running with us, complicit. Accepting; silent.

What does this mean?

We've talked. He wants kids; he's working very deliberately towards a future that I don’t believe is available any longer. It wont be there when we reach it. I wonder how he would react to what I expect. If he accepted that the world will be quite different in 5 years, what would he do?

Supposedly, there's a porn movie called Two to Love, featuring a (un?/)fortunate Japanese woman who was born with two vaginas.

I read this in a book.

This arouses questions. Are they situated adjacent to each other, in the usual place? Or are they separately located, one residing in, say, an armpit? If the former, then, are they one above the other, or side by side? Are they the same size? Equally accomodating? Do her vaginas also include the usual related features? A cervix? A womb?

These are questions that wail for answers.

Interestingly, Googling "'two to love' movie vaginas" returns a first result concerning Winnie the Pooh, and nothing about the topic I seek.

I lost my mp3 player. The Christmas mp3 player my ex presented to me in a deluge of gifts, like a puppy, delighted to please me.

My favorite shoes have worn out. The shoes that I fought with the salesgirl over and refused to buy, so he went back and bought them for me, and I knew he was really my boyfriend.

There's so little left that he gave me. The t-shirt he thrust at me as he strode through my door the second summer, while he wouldn't meet my eyes, and I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. It will get threadbare and expire. Greeting cards and notes, grown dusty; faded and wilting somewhere. Notes he left when he left my bed, saying thank you and goodbye, glowing love. The cheesy birthday card with a handwritten long rhyming poem, rich with humour and wit.

Soon all the physical things he left me with that remind me of him will be gone, like snowbanks melting.

I've been spying on him on Facebook, through someone else's profile. I excised him from Facebook the day I dumped him, although I considered leaving our relationship status up, to see how long until he'd grow the gumption to change it. I've been reading every word on his wall, his old statuses, date-matching them to what I know, the overlap between me and she. Studying his photos, his sunlit grin beaming, his legs as athletic as ever, his arm around his new brunette, in Cuba. I try to divine whether he's happier now. I try to be happy for him, and fall far short.

Question:

Peak Oil vs. Environmental crisis. Which kicks us in the bag first?

Earthquake in China...

Environmental crisis, up one-nothing.

The world is coming to an end, and I'm looking forward to it.

For about 2-3 years now, I've had this anxiety pinching the back of my mind. Like white noise or a mousquito in the room, it's behind everything - a constant apprehension, especially loud when I think about the future or start planning.

Reading Thom Hartmann's book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: the Fate of the World and what we can do about it before it's too late, was a huge relief. To sum it up, there's too many people living on the earth, the resources are going to run out, and the first world is irredeemably dependent on oil, which is certain to run out in our lifetime. More pertinently, peak oil is going to happen, imminently. It may already be happening.

Google peak oil if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's when the cost/difficulty of getting oil out of the ground becomes greater than the demand for oil, and there's all kinds of consequences. The cost of oil will rise, nations will protect their oil supplies with force, all the "protected" resources of the world will get tapped, and the lives of people around the planet will change in ways we can't really predict.

It's anyone's guess whether this socio-economic event will happen before the natural catalclysms resulting from global warming begin, since it's generally acknowledged now that the earth's balance systems are perched on a sharp fulcrum.

What knowing this (reading the book) meant was that I felt like I wasn’t crazy, or depressed, just that I was feeling stress and distress about what was happening in the world. The sense of humans and animals in despair and under threat, natural areas being raped, and impending disaster affects all of us, to whatever degree an individual can block it out, or let it in.

We know on some level, conscious or not, what's happening out there, however insulated by our first world comforts we are. Wake up. It's a bit of relief for it to be conscious.

And so, I know my life is going to change, dramatically, sometime in the next 10 years. I expect it; I'm going to prepare for it to the best of my knowledge, and I won't be surprised the day the US randomly invades Iran (again), and the price of gas starts to spike.

We all know this world we've built together isn't going to last. Capitalism and endless growth wasn't a model made to last. No planet with finite boundaries can ever last forever, and we are coming to that point where this planet runs out of space. How about that.

It's going to be a new world, and that's kind of exciting.

Movies to watch on the topic are Crude Impact, Crude Awakening, and the End of Suburbia. Check out www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net for what to do about peak oil.

Living in "We"land

So I end up in a married life, with married problems, curious about the married benefits. I have always been curious about those. There must be some rare beauty in being with one person for a long time, through thick and thin. I don't know what it is, and I don't see anyone else modeling it, but the idealist in me believes it must be there.

What I've learned so far:
When you enter a relationship believing it's going to last a long time, you're more inclined to examine problems as they show up, and to build habits and guidelines from the beginning. It's like "Ok, this might seem small now, but if it happens another 200 times, I'll kill us both, so how 'bout we talk about it".

I read more about relationship and in greater depth. I've learned that there's a hormonal phenomena that happens for 18 months, at which point the relationship expires or turns into "something else". So I have that to look forward to. No one is very clear on what the "something else" is. Perhaps it's when usually things get boring, or when you can't think of anything else to say, so someone blurts out "Let's get married," to keep it interesting.

I'm not sure I believe this solid timeline, anyways, although the scientists agree. 18 months. C and I have been battered through the rocks already, and we feel our time together has been much accelerated. It seems like a few years already (time flies when you're having fun, after all).

I didn't know I could get so mad.

Regardless, I'm thrilled to be with him, a majority of the time at any rate. And whenever I'm thinking of leaving him, I'm totally miserable.