Eerily soothing

DRUG NAMES PRONOUNCED
"Drug names can be hard to pronounce. Different health care professionals can have very different pronunciation for the same drug name. This list is therefore an uncertain, and sometimes idiosyncratic, guide, but we hope it will prove helpful."

I'm in the process of downloading the entire directory and will string them together and roll the result into GarageBand for some fun. Why not?

Birthday Party

People from across the Colin-Social-Diaspora came to my Birthday/Housewarming/Blackout Party (it being the first anniversary of the great blackout) and hung out. Thanks to my brother, who along with MK and Kat, took time to drop in during the day to give me a hand/offer advice/support as I found new ways to procrastinate instead of cleaning and prepping my place for people to arrive. I'm sure that they were shocked that the place looked okay when they came back a couple hours later for the beginning of the festivities. Everyone assures me that it was a good time and everyone got along really well. I got to watch the sunrise on the new day. Thank you to everyone who came and helped me celebrate the close of a difficult year.

outsourcing the recursive nightmare

Last week I had Mike spend some time with me between social engagements. It was great to have somebody hanging out that didn't require constant care and feeding. Not that I often have high maintenance people stay over at my condo, but you know. He's a great guy - a stand up, knock down, has your back in a confrontational moment and at the end of it all whip out a witty retort/summation of it it all in a looks-to-easy-to-be-easy kinda great guy. And I think that he'll make one hell of a writer if he holds himself to that course.

The past two weeks have been brutal in their work content. I've had a couple unintentional sleep-overs at the office, a stressful supplier issue, some cool meetings. In all things are great, I just need to get a bit of a break to let the brain activity drop down to the bottom of the gauge.

The last cool meeting was on board the Casita with the boys from work and two clients. A couple hours on a sailboat and I'm totally hooked. Richard said that a sailboat was "a hole in the water that you shovel money into." Very true, but it could be argued that that is a good thing.

The cool meeting before that had to do with meeting Don McKellar while he was attending a meeting at my place of work. He seems like a really great guy. His movie ChildStar is opening at the Toronto Film Festival. Chopper is doing the trailer.

Most of today I hung out in the condo working up the motivation to clean. I found motivation somehow and have finished cleaning. The process, once started was theraputic. The result is pleasing. After noticing I had been playing my iPod for eight hours straight, I decided to give it a break and turned on a station from the netherlands - really not bad, I don't listen to corporate radio here in Toronto, so I can't really compare it. I heard The Streets "Dry Your Eyes" for the first time on this station. The video is pretty good, too. I have no idea of how they are doing in North America, but they are 2 on the UK charts . The mix of tunage has been pleasing enough that I won't go into an angry diatribe about the lack of CBC radio streaming while the olympics is on - damn the IOC and their last century perspectives. Only one more day and the mighty CBC will be back.

Things on my mind:
condo's need for a blog and how I need to get on that really soon. Like last year really soon. The newsletter also needs to be finished.

my vacation itinerary: Toronto->Mtl->Quebec City->Baie St-Paul->Tadousac, after that LA to see Sarah? or NY to be cool? or somewhere else? I don't know.

Intern Academy (Posted: Sat. 28 Aug/04)

Chopper did the commercial/trailer for this film written/directed by Second City Alumnus Dave Thomas.

[here is the link! Further to all of this, I'm going to be on the red carpet for the premier on the first of Sept - my bosses have disallowed me from wearing a tux. To bad, that would be hilarious.]

Dr. Eliza

I had a very good therapy session with Eliza this afternoon. But the f'ing java program ate the best part. I recommend having a chat with whichever version of the good doctor that you can find. Try it a couple different ways: as a pervert, a teenaged version of yourself (if that isn't what you currently are - this helps us remember ourselves and I think is a good experiment...), as a clown, a sarcastic angry person, and finally, as yourself. Be honest with Dr. Eliza, let her lead you through talk therapy - it give you a chance to see the internal world form a verifiable trace (via the logs that you will no doubt wish to keep - if you can stand fooling yourself, keeping logs and reading what you have written.)

[I don't know why I kept this as a draft for so long... well, I do know, but I'll post that shortly - so you prob. will have already read the update on memeboy/distance.]

from Aug 7, 2004

It has been a very creatively fertile week. Smacked around the "faster bigger louder" video a bit with J & K to create a revised "faster bigger louder - redux" version. Found out that we've got a pretty cool client coming in on Wednesday at work. (Well I think he is cool... for now.) Did some good socializing with Sick Girl. SG was coming off the end of a flu - she has been having too much fun for a thirty–year–old it seems. Sat down and wrote a outline for a pretty interesting short (maybe twenty minutes tops).

Checked my email and got this stupid fwd: and decided to create the "Stupid Forward of the Week Award" I will post its co-ordinates when they become available.

I need to add linkage.

[Aug 28: I saved this as a draft, and really don't see much point in updating it - it was late and that's what I thought about things at that point. I can't remember off hand what the "stupid post of the week" was going to be, I guess I'll post it later, if/when I find it and if it really merits that much attention]

"Lot Full"

Amongst many other things, I am not 'street.' My ex and I would always bug each other about how 'not street' the other was. Well here is my proof for my non-streetness: I'm producing a music video for The Lowest of the Low, a band that, up until now, I called indie-punk, but now, after being at a Murder Squad concert (UPDATE (3:16am): Dwayne Slack is the connection here. More on that later, if I can muster the energy for a further entry) I can only consider them (the Lowest) to be a barely more hardcore than Blink 182. Murder Squad is a band that has adherents that wear nothing but black, black leather and black denim.

I wear flip-flops. On no less than two occasions, whilst in the modest mosh pit, did I lose my flip-flops. Each time (during lulls in the ruckus) I was able to recover my footwear. But never was I able to recover my black jeans or black t-shirt, because I wasn't wearing either.

I was the only person not wearing any black, and again, I was the only person wearing flip-flops. Yet, no one killed me, spit on me or mocked me. I moshed with them as an equal (until my legs wore out, and then I was a total wimp - even drinking more beer, the universal muscle relaxant, did not remedy my cramping legs,) I was welcomed into the group as if I had always been a member, truly proof that real tribes are genuinely inclusive groups that are open to others, especially neophytes. The most memorable moment was when an older gent said, while holding the lower portion of his back, that he "felt nearly torn into two" and smiled about it.

I escaped during the impromptu encore of Murder Squad, knowing my own limits after working out alcohol absorption calculations to get me home before I became a black-out victim. Whoosh! So many people outside in my neighbourhood, why? The Caribana is one, of course!

The incredible presence of the police was not missed by anyone - Dozens every block, or so it seemed. And I guess because of this there were no major incidence reported (as of this post) - everyone was too busy watching the rather pretty mounted police at John and Richmond to get into any trouble. Before making it that far, I had to stop and get some sustenance. I stopped at the most unlikely of locations, a small store front on Richmond called Hot Spot which attempts to differentiate itself from other quick service sandwich joints on the Club Stip by offering really good grilled sandwiches and a television blaring satellite tv triple-x pornography. I have to say that their grilled tuna sandwich with extra cheese was super yummie amazing...