6 posts tagged “weekends”
Quiet days. Mildly depressed as I always seem to be every November what with a long cold winter ahead of us.
* Met a Brazilian and had a very heated conversation about crime in Sao Paolo, Japanese gestures, and Quebec nationalism.
* Missed an art exhibit by 20 minutes but met the artist and others outside the gallery as they closed up shop. Damn.
* Helped someone find a lost passport while speaking on the phone. "Did you look X?" "Try looking Y." We were unsuccessful.
so both masa and marie are gone for 10 days more (masa in tokyo, marie in south dakota and houston) and i am in this big old house alone. how strange! i don't think i've spent this much time on my own in quite some time--when i first moved to bangkok, i guess. but even then, i was working every day in a school so was surrounded by people. here i'm just on my own from morning to night. not complaining, and plenty of things to do socially, though i decided to lay low last night. the cat, oyster, misses the peeps, too, so he has not wanted to leave my side in two days and, in fact, slept on my chest much of the night. grrrrr. dumb cat.
and i was sooo hoping i'd have a month or so to chill out from the big project i just finished, but no sooner had i invoiced my job then i was asked to do another. i know i should be happy (this is big bucks), but it's not as if this is the ONLY work i'm doing! the thing that is a drag is that for some reason unknown to me (these big publishing conglomerates are such poor planners when it comes down to the daily grind), they are behind deadline which means they want me to take up the slack (i.e., work my butt off for the next three weeks to get the project back on schedule).
so much for a quiet july to do some personal projects! i DID want another publishing project but i was imagining more something in september or october while we're in buenos aires. oh well, we freelancers can't be too choosy, so i have to step it up once again. weekend? what weekend?
my plan is to work until 4 (on something totally unrelated to the above), read for an hour or so (colm toibin's the master), then take the subway up to danny's for heidy's birthday BBQ. and fireworks tonight after? mmmm. and tomorrow? more work! probably until 3-ish, then hang out with my friend jacques who is stuck here in montreal waiting for his US visa to come through so he can start his job teaching at brown in september. any good movies playing? i am SO out of it when it comes to the outside world!
plenty going on!
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last night at mado for the show with heidy, lisa, and some other people i used to work with. show: so-so. french drag queens talk too much blah blah blah. and the best thing about drag shows are the guys who are there to have FUN and don't take it all so seriously. a couple of the performances were good but most were dull, some overdone queen with too much makeup dancing around to some patti labelle tune. YAWN. and the village was dead last night; usually cold doesn't stop the montrealers, but there weren't many people around generally. wonder why...
- so we came home and stayed up late watching the muppet show and looney tunes. oy. i keep telling myself that
i am trying to do mindless things before i start a really hard class in january that will make my head hurt with too much thinking (lacan and trauma theory and foucault and derrida), but this is a new low. i was actually laughing out loud at the muppet show! true, it was 3am and i was dead tired, but there you go. and bugs bunny is so funny! once school starts up again and i am working my butt off, i will remember back fondly when i had the time to stay up late watching mindless tv. in all fairness, much of the muppet show (which i haven't seen since i was a kid) was pretty mindless. only some bits were funny...
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and found some great stuff on iTunes. arvo pärt, who is one of my favorite composers and a good jazz christmas album. both i heard being played either on last.fm or accuradio over the last few days. nothing like good music on a cold winter morning when you have to work. i would love to upload something here, but it's such a pain in the ass when it's in mp4 format and i don't have the energy, so you'll just have to take my word for it: these are great albums.
- still haven't gotten my reading rhythm back. been trying to get through a
really interesting book on krakatoa, the volcano that erupted in the 1880s and caused massive destruction. it's interesting, actually, and i'm enjoying (i always enjoy simon winchester's books), but i only end up reading about 10 pages a day. guess i feel happy and content lately, which always means i read less. or it could be all this working i'm doing. when i read for 8 hours straight for work, breaking apart writing, analyzing it, deciding how it can best be ripped apart and put back together, the last thing i want to do is read something else, even if it's well-written. i also have like three new books that i keep telling myself i will read before school starts up again but it's looking bleaker and bleaker..
