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September 28, 2008

four candles, five things

I've never been the kind of person who responds to chain letters, and have in the past threatened to block loved ones from sending me e-mails unless they stop forwarding me those dismal messages penned by failed greeting card copywriters promising good luck within X number of hours of spamming everyone you know. But using twitter these last few months has got me thinking in 140-character blurbs and feeling too lazy to string whole sentences together, whole groups of thoughts into something worth writing here. It's like what Sesame Street did to the attention spans of children of my generation, priming us for a lifetime of 30-second-commercial watching. Add to that a general feeling of lethargy that's been hard to shake and it means that dear old diary here isn't getting much action.

So, Mildred sent me a little chain letter the other day, one of these "write six random facts about yourself" things, and given my lack of interest lately in making the effort to write something meaningful here, I'm happy to comply. Except, since I love to break rules, I'm only going to give y'all five little tidbits today. "Four candles, six things" just didn't sound as good. Also I'm pretty sure I've done one of these things in the past, and folks, I'm just not all that interesting. Five things is plenty, trust me.

Mildred, by the way, is someone I met at the Southern Graphics Council conference last spring. She approached me at a gallery opening and said, "hi Jodi, I read your blog" and it pretty much made my night in the same sort of awesome hey, worlds collide! way as that time at a fibre festival when someone recognized me by my dress (from my thesis project). Maybe I told that story already, I forget. And I'm not going back and checking either. Deal with it, my dears.

Ahem. 1. I love yogurt, and I love dill, and I like cucumbers a lot too, but tzatziki makes me want to barf. Just the thought of any savoury flavour blended with yogurt grosses me out. Coffee flavoured yogurt? Yuck. I think it's because I'm allergic to dairy, and while yogurt is the one dairy food that I'm able to safely eat, if it's savoury it reminds me of things made with sour cream, from which my body wants to recoil so fiercely that I don't even like to pass the sour cream container at the supper table or move it around in the fridge. That dip that everyone loves to bring to parties, with the sour cream and mushroom soup mix? Ew, ew, ew.

2. The town I grew up in was a decommissioned Royal Canadian Air Force station, and when I was a kid the old air raid siren would go off at noon every day to signal lunch time to the factories. Every day in school we'd leap from our desks at the siren's call and run home to lunch. To this day the sound of an air raid siren makes me hungry, and knowing all about Pavlov and his dog doesn't make a damned bit of difference. So if you ever invite me to a movie about the Blitz you'd better be prepared to buy me some popcorn.

3. I think way too long and hard about my neuroses (see #s 1 and 2 above). Also, many of my neuroses have to do with food.

4. I love to crack my joints, and pretty much never go to sleep at night without first cracking all of my toes multiple times, which I'm sure just delights anyone who ever has to sleep with me (although Peter has rarely complained about it, he's a trouper). I would give just about anything for someone to teach me an easy and safe way to crack my spine at that spot right between the shoulder blades. Don't tell me this is bad for me, I do not even want to hear it. No, really.

5. I have a bad habit of starting something and being completely obsessed with it and nothing else for a while, usually until it's almost finished, then dropping it like a hot potato. Witness my February Lady sweater, which would have been completed in a week if I hadn't lost steam a third of the way into that second sleeve. It's sitting in a heap next to me now, waiting to be knitted, but I'm bored with it. The same thing happened with countless sweaters. With those thistles in the back yard that I was all pumped to cut down and kill and instead I just cut the tops off them and now they're two metres tall and take up an area of ground roughly the size of our deck. And with this weblog (four years old today), which has become just like all those sketchbooks I draw in until they're half filled and then stop, and upon finding them months or years later am unable to throw them out but no longer have any interest in filling those empty pages. I found a roll of drawings upstairs from four years ago, large half finished figure drawings that I now have no idea what to do with (recycling bin?). This paragraph, on the other hand, I should have quit ages ago now.

Here's something I did see through to the end today. Peter and I are working on a project, cataloguing all of our records. Pete created a database and I went through the shelves and wrote down every record we had and then entered them all. Now we can sort them by release date, and soon we're going to start listening to them all in chronological order and liveblogging our listening experience. I've been plugging away for the last week or so at entering artists and albums into the database and researching release dates, and this was the last record on my list, number 565 in the database:

Posted by jodi at September 28, 2008 08:27 PM | categories:  self-absorbtion

Comments

Posted by: Jessica Gregory at September 29, 2008 01:16 AM

Posted by: grace at September 29, 2008 11:09 AM

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Posted by: TheAmpuT at October 8, 2008 12:14 AM