Gonna miss you dude....

"In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before."
John Updike - "A&P"

Random thought

If wishes were fishes, I'd have a freakin' city aquarium right now.

MmmmmmMyriade!

After reading about it in the local paper and hearing about it from a few friends, I finally got a chance to check out Cafe Myriade for myself. Wow! Tiny place tucked in next to Concordia. I went with fellow coffee lover, Roberta, this morning before the crowds. We had the place mostly to ourselves, and we were able to have a lovely and informative talk with co-owner, Anthony. Not only can he make a perfect latte, he can also impart his extensive knowledge on coffees and teas in a very open and friendly manner. You get excellent coffee, you get it without pretension, a perfect combination.

I started with a latte, lovely, excellent temp, and beautifully presented. Then Roberta and I shared a pot of Ethiopian Yergacheffe. We were so impressed that we each bought some beans to take home. One more latte and we were wired and ready to go home to lunch just as the rest of the city was walking in for their fix.
I will be returning very soon :-)

Text addict

If you were to tell me a couple of years ago that I would become addicted to texting from my phone, I would say that you were crazy. Why would I text from my phone? Hitting the keys multiple times to get the right letters, each word taking forever to spell out, those annoying abbreviations and shortenings and using numbers for sounds (l8er, or is that l8r?), how is that writing? And yet, here I sit two years l8er staring at my cell phone bill and realising that I have been charged an extra $24 in texting fees. This is also why I am on hold with my provider to extend my text plan so this doesn't happen again. Messaging has become so common place and natural to me that it has extended to my phone. My friends have also become bitten by the texting bug and text me, I text them back, the cycle repeats over and over. Why call them when you can write? Why bother them when you know that their phone can buzz and they can choose to read and respond or not depending on their day, as opposed to having to immediately answer an insistent ring? What is it about texting that is more appealing? Whatever it is, it is now costing me $4 extra per month.

epiphany

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
- James Joyce, The Dead

Resolutions - or, could you be *more* self-involved?

Ok, the last time I posted resolutions here I didn't end up keeping them and they were fairly simple – learn to juggle and write my friends each a letter over the year. I felt pretty pathetic about it come the end of the year, how lazy can you get? This year I'm not promising to master anything involving hand-eye coordination or anything involving my friends.
This year, I am going to try to be happy. Seems like a very simple thing, and yet sometimes, well, it might as well be learning to juggle. I've been doing a lot of thinking about transitioning and what I would have to change about my life to be happier, but it seems the easier course is to just decide to be happy from moment to moment and make decisions that make those moments happy, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it's selfish.
Last year brought a lot of revelations: life is short and beautiful and should be taken advantage of and savoured. I also feel as though I returned to a place where I can feel the possibilities in my life and the endless potential that is waiting inside me, jumping up and down, eager to run. Perhaps I will do something with it, perhaps not, but I will embrace it this year instead of pushing it down with self doubt and negative thought.
I know that I should say something like, “this year is about family”, or “this year is about making the world a better place”, but I can't. This year is about me, and figuring out what I want. If I manage to save the world too, that's just a happy side effect :-)