The Photo at China Beach

Dear Andrea,

Thank you for the letter and the Photo you sent. I was looking to the articles in general, but as I will have more time I will read them.

Looks they are interesting, today, about this World full of problems. Peoples everywhere on this Planet need real changes, what is possible, as they will give more accent to the conscious examination and control of the retribution for what they spend their energy. Still remain the basic rule: "When the masses want no more to be ruled as before, and the ruler groups could not rule as before, then begins the social revolution."

"The big and large scale of corruption in all spheres of activity, remain the wire to the spark plug from the working battery, which is always is recharged by the desire and the needs for a decent life." In the Ebers Codex - one of the Egyptean Pharaohs, told to his son: "Never take all from the workers on the field, because, nothing is more dangerous than the bitterness of the revolt of the hungry peasans." The rulers must learn and understand to keep the social balance on a good stand, and the masses must learn the rules and the respect of the law, which must be uniq for all members of the society....and many more.

The knowledge and understanding are the basics of a peaceful life, and harmony betwen the peoples. Untill people are ready to "fight" with intelligent words, will be more economy on fuel spent for transportation of troops to the wars, and bringing back the coffins with the corps of dead soldiers, from the front lines. This is only one of examples from other thousands more of the everyday's life.

Take care, walk with open eyes, lucid judgement of the facts and events, and try to remain the helping aid, for thos who need it, as we know and love you since you came to this World and did your first steps. We love you, and belive in your successes, as your parents did and do.

--We send our blessings and hugs,

Your grandparents, Marty and Tata
April 9/2009

Newses

Guess I'm starting to Oh-this-place-is-okay this place.

Sometimes even better & realer.

Here is my new nickname:

4 Nov.2008

Dear Andrea,

The life is very hard, and in the coming years, the fight for the everyday support, will be more harder than it was until now, which we know it was not so easy. We lived and experienced it. When I gave't to you the little pamphlet about the 8 points of personal economy, I gave it with a good reason, to be as guard near you, because I understand also the difficulties of the beginning.

Congratulation for the Hollowe'en party.

We are sure that if you will make a presentation of a written work of you for the audience --reading slower than you speak--you will have a big recognition from your colleges.

Sweetheart, you follow your goal, if you bellive in it, but don't be afraid to change the path, if the circumstances push you to do it. You entered in a society of colleges, who maybe has an other point of view, about the every day life, about the possible coming future, accept what is useful for your advancement, but judge and compare with your philosophical bellive. Prepare yourself for that future which is in a perpetual changes.

Your life experience for adopting to make different activities, is a big value. That understanding helped me, and Marti too, to survive, not with shame, in this new social-political system of the western style of life. If you did not reed the "Future shock" of Toeffler, please read it, or re-read it again. You will discover something new. I know your very precious time is spend to read a lot of material necessary for your basic studies, but find some warning advices also.

We love you,
Marti and Tata.

PS. -Today evening we will know who was elected to be the President of the USA from 2008 --Obama or Mc Cain.

the beginning at The Brown University

Dear Andrea,

We wish from all of our hearts - a happy beginning of your new studies at The Brown University in Providence!

We wish you to have the necessary patience and understanding of your desire and obligation putted before you, to realize the goal to become that personality of the society, who cares about the spiritual life of the citizens, who desire to live in pace, understanding the importance of FREEDOM, in all aspects of this meaning, expressed in this simple word.

We, your grandparents and your Mom, we experienced the life with all aspects of the totalitarian system. We hoped for an other style of life, in which the meaning of LIBERTY will open new opportunities to develop ourselves in a society which still is in march towards the two meanings, presented in this letter: FREEDOM and LIBERTY and a lot of other basic necessary activities.

The words written, directed to wake up the sleeping humankind, could open the mind of the peoples, enforce their judgments in their attitudes, make them more responsible of everything what they do for themselves and the society which parts they are.

Remembering an old expression of a Romanian critic in the XIX-th Century:- "There is easy to write verses, when you have nothing to say..." it is opposite to the idea "With your writings in verses or prose, be a fighter to open the minds and feelings, willing to change the obsolete, with the desire of a continuous improvement of thinking, acting, behaving, etc."

"IF..." of Kipling, to be your adviser, not less as the novels of Balzac, Stendhal-etc., and the universally recognized classics. There is a big treasure of the World Literature in which you could find jewelry about which you could talk to your future students, as values of human thinking.

You are following the path you choused it, you are following the voice of a calling, to spread the knowledge for the future generation. The art and science of word become harder in your interest for, than the art of the motion picture and word combined with the sound of music. About the psychology of interest, there are still a lot of to be analyzed.

Your creative and not less the life independency, will be influenced of the chosen partner of work and life. Make everytime a multi facetted exploration and judgment. You was grown up to be independent and responsible for all your deeds.

MISS ACTIS - is your herald inscription. Maintain the fire of this idea. Listen all advices, and do what and how you judge it will work the deed for your development and progress.

For us is not indifferent your progress in life. You are our continuity

We love you, Marta, Tata and Mom.

Coquitlam, BC September 1st, 2008

Phone Home ♥

WTF

Currently in the SFU library's Information Commons, amongst about forty other winners and runners-up in the 2006 SFU International Photo Contest, there are two enlarged and framed photographs that have something or other to do with me. The first is that photograph I took in Paris of a slick gentleman standing in front of Monet's Waterlilies with just some laser beams of eternity coming out at us from his eyes. The other is a photo that Vicki took of the two of us in front of that star-shaped building in Prague to which lovesick people in the 50s and 60s would travel in the spirit of convalescence. But the peculiar thing I noticed this week is that the nameplates/captions attached to these two photos have been REMOVED, SNATCHED OFF, POSSIBLY PEED ON -- presumably by someone who knows me and who wishes to perform maybe good, maybe evil, but at any rate voodoo on both my objective-imaginative and subjective-suntanned selves. There's just a bit of scotch tape left goo-ing up the corners of these two picture frames, and I just have to say that I feel some weird about it.

I will be setting up a tip line presently and will be rewarding anyone who happens to call in with a BLUE MR. FREEZEE, basically everyone's favourite kind.

"I haven't had a key lime pie in ten years!"

It occurred to me this morning as I ate some pastries that Natural Born Killers came out THIRTEEN (13) (XIII) years ago.

This is the first thing in life that's ever made me feel kind of old and kind of regret not being a Time Scientist at work on various types of pause buttons.

P.S. This is Olympia:

Miraculous Mascara Removal Pad

Behold this which happened yesterday afternoon after a woman from VGH was so rude to me on the phone that I cried:

I invite your bid!

The Right Grad School

It is so damn early and I am so damn completely awake and spry from a dream I just had about picking the right grad school. Am also reluctant, for superstitious reasons that have to do with jinxing my whole future, to disclose which grad school this was, but in my dream there were at least 237829 appealing restaurant-bars just a balloon ride away from the 'PhD acreage' I was to dwell upon with my many horses and boyfriends and Mac Notebooks. There were also some details, less likely to materialize in real life I suppose, about my grad school being so up north that the lightest colour the skies ever got was this bruisy, streaky aubergine, that the local oxygen smelled like new snowpants but rosier, that what I mostly drank was different kinds of hot cider, and that my favourite outfit tended to be bear skins. It was all really gorgeous.

Old Crushes

Having a pretty great time being back to my adolescent reading habits yet finding that Marxist and Feminist and Postcolonial and Affect theory hasn't turned everything else all stupid and archaic (except for most novels). Actually, these kinds of books are still amazing for me to read:

- R. D. Laing, The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience
- Kirk J. Schneider, The Paradoxical Self: Toward an Understanding of Our Contradictory Nature
- Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
- Colin Wilson, The Occult. (Mine is a real smelly old editon from which I scissored excerpts all through high school to send to my internet boyfriend who I thought would probably want to join the Golden Dawn with me one day and perform rituals about being geniuses and possessing "Faculty X" and being straightedge graphic designers and poets as well.)

I am still jobless but enough people have told me to have patience that I'm actually starting to have it. So now I'm just letting myself read about psychedelic things and find interesting ways to cook all the asparagus that is really on sale these days and think about poetry/film/dissertation projects and go to Yogalates three times a week and ride my bike to the swings on Wall Street and go see student plays at my former-forever university. One of the other things I'm letting myself do is drink a lot of gin, which is fun and expansive until you end up in your therapist's office late and hungover and being a messy asshole trying to channel the late R. D. Laing. Ronnie Laing, as he is called, was really hot, kind, sensitive, and Scottish, and fathered at least ten children before dropping dead in France during a game of tennis.

Turns out he did a bunch of lectures and interviews at SFU in the early 80s, which you can see in the documentary Did You Used to Be R. D. Laing? after I watch it a third time and return it, probably late, to the library. He seems exceptionally drunk and silly in some of the footage. Had I not been born in Toronto I would probably enjoy pretending that Ronnie Laing did probably father me.

Do You Like My Sweatshirts?

Andrea's First Yop, Including One Image of Her Saying "Yop!"

Sort of Moody Today

Got home last night after eight days in Ontario, in Sugarbush then Toronto, which is where I grew up and am thinking I should live again for at least some of my roaring twenties. On the plane ride home I watched two hours of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, an hour of Law & Order (SVU), and an hour of stuff about the drug habits of Kate Moss and Robert Downey, Jr. Robert Downey, Jr., was my first Hollywood crush, even before Edward Furlong made my pubescence itch in Terminator 2, which I didn't watch on the plane but managed to see and enjoy three times last month on Panamanian television.

Today I went to see a therapist and had some curry at Main and Broadway and noticed a lot of assholes on the bus.

Jady's really late coming home but he's probably just buying me a million chocolates filled with money.

It would be good for me to get employed soon.

23 of It

A Tantastic Fan

There are some things I like about being in a tropical paradise. For instance: eating corn bread fried in pork fat and knowing you look very cute and marryable from afar as you poke around at low tide collecting seashells and getting your back scorched. Other things I like about it are that sangria comes in a 2-litre box for $1.99 and that a $4.00 bottle of rum comes with a free set of dominoes, which is a game that everyone in a tropical paradise loves to cheat at. I like hearing true stories about hammerhead shark attacks "just off the point," which the man telling the story is able to point at, and I sort of like the smell of Deet repellents. I like it that dogs probably don't speak English in a tropical paradise and how it is even more fun than usual to play on the internet in a tropical paradise, since you don't get to that often -- either the computers are slow and bad or you feel guilty for not being at the beach, playing dominoes with people, or reading Eduardo Galeano essays in a hammock like you should be. I like lying on my back in the sand at three a.m. in a tropical paradise and feeling like I'm going to throw up from all the stars, or from missing things intensely, like Europe and friends.

The thing I don't like about a tropical paradise is that you have dreams at night about watching your childhood pet Shar-Pei get hit by a truck, about being forced by something inscrutable to swim in a hot tub of rat feces, about leprosy, and about ostriches with the faces of dead children, to whom you ask the question, "What should I be when I grow up?" and to which they respond, "A cor-o-ner!"

The thing I like about being back in a cold Canadian city is that I can eat Banana Nut Muslix again for breakfast and look at snowy mountains from my window and play on the internet all I want and not toss skin peelings to the wind but put them into their proper assigned cigar box (just kidding!) and wear scarves and boots and be an English Department groupie and get back to being neurotic and worried about everything, especially what I'm going to be when I grow up.

Am shooting for two hours on the elliptical this afternoon and a sober, optimistic week/life!

The Opposite of Dying in a Plane Crash

Panamanama

Tomorrow I am leaving for Panama with Jady and his two siblings (around our ages, and fun and funny) and his two parents, who are paying for many things. We are staying for three weeks. I'm feeling nervous because I have never been anywhere with lots of beaches and palm trees and relaxing with your boyfriend and some sharks, and am afraid that because I can't conjure an image of it in my mind, maybe the universe can't either. As usual, I'm trying to over-imagine our plane crashing so as to decrease the odds of it actually happening, of actually getting exploded over Central America into a million sad pieces of recently graduated 22-and-three-quarters-year old.

Sharon was telling me a while ago about a short story she read where the narrator, who has an infant daughter, spends virtually all day imagining scenarios that would be fatal for her child, in order to render them cosmically less likely. This is similar to what I do before getting on airplanes, and is probably not an uncommon psychological strategy. It probably makes things extra shitty, though, when you realize that something terrible and final actually is happening, like you've done everything intellectually and spiritually possible to anticipate and thereby preclude this violence, but no, you're just some pathetic anchovy that God's deciding to flick off his pizza.

But since I'm not going to die on the plane (especially now that I've blogged about it), and probably not by some sharks either, what I am looking forward to the most is getting a tan. I think I look extremely attractive when I am much browner. And having a hot tan will be useful for when I return to Vancouver and am forced to look for work at Earls.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year on Vimeo

The Gift of Sartre

From Jady's sister and her boyfriend.

Three Things

1. I just won fifty dollars for my photo of this slick gentleman.


2. Look at this goddamn tortoise's face!


3. Last night while drinking Goldschlager and listening to Kris Kristofferson with my dad and I, my mom asked if we would please "for the love of God" put this video of her on YouTube, which she calls 'LeTube' for I haven't a clue what reason.

The Name of Andrea

Andrea dear:

In our family the day of 30 November it was since I know myself it was a very important day. In the Christian calendar is the day of Saint Andrew. My father was Andrew, or Andrash in Hungarian. My oldest brother was too Andrash, and his son too, but is using the Romanian pronunciation Andrei or Andrey. My youngest brother Ladislau or Laszlo daughter was named also Andrea. And you are also using the name of Andrea.

Why it was so important this day for us? In the time of the First World War, father was at the Russian front where a shrapnel (a certain form of bullet or bomb) hit their trench where he and his soldier collogue were maneuvering a machine gun.

Unfortunately his soldier collogue died, my father was taken to the hospital. When he took out from his pocket his prayer book, he saw on the hardcover the sign of a pressure of a bullet. The hardcover of his prayer book escape him from death. Then he made a solemn promise, that all his life will celebrate this day. An so he did, with his family. At this day we came together,and as it was the day of preparation of different meat food from pork, all members of the family participated years and years, celebrating with a good dinner, singing songs about love, joy,happyness,and friendship.

Now we congratulate you from our family and in my brother’s family on the occasion of you name day. As an old expression: God bless you Andrea, with good health, joy, success and a lot of happiness.

Tata, Marty, Meme (Your grandpa, grandma, greatgrandma).

(Visit Andrea's page here.)

ENGLISH MAJOR GRADUATE

You Are All Sanpaku

As the front page of our CBC is reporting, "Diana killed in 'tragic accident', not murder conspiracy: inquiry." That if the chauffeur hadn't been drunk and speeding and if the paparazzi hadn't been in frenzied pursuit of the maybe-maybe-not-pregnant Diana and her lover, the accident wouldn't have happened. I accept this; however, I think the 'inquiry' people are missing something.

What I think they need to be inquiring about is the late princess's eyes. Specifically, the wild floatiness of those irises. Please read this article on sanpaku, check out this rigorous Wikipedia entry on the same, maybe order a copy of the George Ohsawa classic You Are All Sanpaku, and try to tell me then that her death could have been prevented--by anything other than a macrobiotic diet.

"When women. When women."

So my paper on Lisa Robertson is done but I really smell like
I'm dead.

Pneumonia But Diana

I have pneumonia.

But check out Diana's threads!

So many more where these came from.

Looking Forward To It

Here's a tentative list of all the things I haven't learned much about in school but plan to learn much about once school's done:

Pier Pasolini
Boethius
weightlifting for intermediate/subtle buffness
CPR
Affect Theory
Iris Murdoch
BPD
day trading
scotch
Islam
how to save the planet
waxing
wearing heels
relaxing
Uranus

Amen

Jady stayed up all night last night writing a History paper on the Turkish language reforms.

But now Jady is done being an undergraduate! He's just gone to the Bay to buy himself long underwear and a yellow tie and I'm hoping a lot of Lindt chocolate balls or bars. I haven't felt so happy and excited for anyone in my life -- except maybe, one winter when I was very young, my favourite figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi.


My own situation, however, remains painful and dire.

"God one and three and three in one," help me with my Augustine paper! "Stand firm, my mind, concentrate with resolution...on the point where truth is beggining to dawn!" Let classes be cancelled tonight and pizzas to my kingdom come!

Realizations & Fungus

What I realized today is that Chinese hot & sour soup tastes like cats' blood. And that I'm losing track of what I look like because all I do now is wear black jeans and get unflattering haircuts. And that I miss Rebecca and having a tan and magazines. And that Saint Augustine is the exact opposite of Simone de Beauvoir. And that you shouldn't try to teach yourself Heidegger without Dexedrine or lots of time or somebody's help and except for pleasure. And that going to the gym actually makes it much harder to write papers because all you end up wanting to do is try new recipes, try on outfits, lie braindead on the floor or just call people. And that the better I get at thinking and writing the more impossible and unhappy thinking and writing become. But that snow is pretty and makes me want to eat poison less. And that what's going on in these coffee mugs is kind of pretty also.

Plans For the Future

This afternoon at Value Village I obtained VHS copies of both All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Land Before Time.

After I've handed in my last paper on December 8th, the plan is to come home, make two dozen litres of sangria, and watch Don Bluth films until somebody offers me a fabulous career.

We Made Arts

Tonight, instead of going out and getting drunk or staying home and writing term papers, Jady and I compromised by staying home, getting drunk, and painting!



I made a garlic


and a Jady:


Jady made one of these:


This was a good night. Goodnight.

More From the Island of Goatfuckers

If you are interested in reading something heady and beautiful, go here. It is Gerald of Wales again, from his preface to The History and Topography of Ireland. I spent an hour typing it out so it could exist on the internet and confuse fans of Lisa Robertson.

To Eat of the Meat of the Mare

Here's a sample of what I'm reading in Medieval Literature class:

There is in the nothern and farther part of Ulster, namely in Kenelcunill, a certain people which is accustomed to appoint its king with a rite altogether outlandish and abominable. When the whole people of that land has been gathered together in one place, a white mare is brought forward into the middle of the assembly. He who is to be inaugurated, not as a chief, but as a beast, not as a king, but as an outlaw, has bestial intercourse with her before all, professing himself to be a beast also. The mare is then killed immediately, cut up in pieces, and boiled in water. A bath is prepared for the man afterwards in the same water. He sits in the bath surrounded by all his people, and all, he and they, eat of the meat of the mare which is brought to them. He quaffs and drinks of the broth in which he is bathed, not in any cup, or using his hand, but just dipping his mouth into it round about him. When this unrighteous rite has been carried out, his kingship and dominion have been conferred.

The History and Topography of Ireland (1185), Gerald of Wales

Here's what I'm making for dinner:

Life is grossing me out.

Someone Shoot Us

Forecasting

Consumed an entire pack of Sour Skittles last night while sitting on a handicapped person's toilet in the SFU library, not pooing or peeing but trying to picture what the rest of my life will look like.

Came home and discovered that I used to be Suri Holmes-Cruise:


Which means that one day I'll be rich and fucked up, just like the rainbow told me.

Swingin'

Rising and Shining

Spent the weekend on an island called Sointula, near Alert Bay, which takes twelve hours to get to, which used to be a progressive Finnish commune, where you can now buy chic high waisted denims for a toonie a pair at a vintage shop that is open only three hours a week, where the island cemetery is full of people who died in their twenties and thirties and whose families asked for headstones with trout carved into them, and where 60-year old men, the ones who somehow and unfortunately didn't die, will offer to "take ya to Bear Point and fuck ya."

The best part was meeting a horse. This video reveals how easily impressed I am by the horse and how much I love horses; it should also convince people on the internet to buy me a horse.

You'd think that with how busy I've been lately, I'd be doing way more procrastiblogging, my whole 'write about three dumb things in one day so you don't end up eating a lot Cheezwhiz from a spoon instead' deal. Actually, living with the person I want to spend all my time with really saves a lot of time and neuroses, and we are both eating very well. Things like pork tenderloin and yam coins and lemon yogurt and Muesli. We have so much Tupperware.

I woke up an hour ago with a concrete poem stuck in my tear ducts about how funny it is to wake up with a concrete poem in your tear ducts about how funny it is to have to sleep horizontally. Unlike the horses. Wrote it out in Word and it is really stupid.

The Word Tat Endid

and it's like whoever emails me

This sounds so stinking fishy.

MyDeathSpace: With 666 Being the Mark of the Beast

I want to write a long critical post on this, but am too worried about falling down an elevator shaft or getting shot in the head or overdosing on cocaine or having fatal complications from lime disease -- and about how to make my homicidal crimes against people who spell advertising 'andertising' and don't even proofread their hate mail appear to be fatal complications from lime disease -- to really properly collect my feelings.


I have spent the past five hours reading about dead MySpace members and visiting their crappy profiles and obsessing over that one post in the comments section that would've been the last the doomed teenager ever read. This has been the very worst evening I've ever spent on the internet.

I am even more scared of everything in the universe right now than I was after seeing The Ring.

Mission Criterion

I have just emailed the folks at Criterion Collection with the following suggestion:

Czech new-wave director Ivan Passer's 1965 film, 'Intimate Lighting', is currently unavailable to order in North America. It's not even around on VHS, according to all the video store owners I've asked within my city (Vancouver, Canada). I saw it in Prague over the summer and was surprised to learn that Criterion hadn't picked it up yet (though Criterion had released the in many respects abominable 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'; do you actually think this is a good movie? It is completely embarrassing to watch).

'Intimate Lighting' is possibly the most beautiful and understated and memorable film I've seen in my life, and I wish I were in a position to show it to everyone I care about, including the dolphins and whales. Please consider releasing this title. I will buy a copy for everyone I know and it will make the world a better, more intimate, more lighting place.

Thanks very much,

Andrea Actis

To help get the ball that is the whole world rolling, you should probably write to Criterion too.

A Loving Critique

Dear Andrea,

The place you visited is preaity, an excellent opportunity for nice pictures. Give a bigger attention for the portraitures in the nature, as the big contrast of the reflecting surfaces could suppress the visibility of the face..I am speaking mostly about your face and the shadow from the "superhat". In this cases if it is possible, use the helping flash lite.

The nature is excellent, and the observations are good chosen. you have to see some National Geographic Magazine issues, and compare. Every picture in the nature have to say much more than what the lens captured it.

Don't worry, you are in a good path, and do not stop observing the variability of the nature, catch the interesting movement on it, its specific forms, richness of factures and colors,the beauty of all elements which forms the composition -the final picture. Lines, forms, directions, balance, patches, tonalities, colors, etc. are the same values, as the words, orders of them in a sentence, their meanings in a harmony or contrast, to express the idea what the writer or poet wants to communicate to the readers or audience. be a poet and writer in your photography too. we love you, and thanks you share with us your feelings of the moments which you enjoyed in your excursion.

With many-many hugs, MARTI and TATA.

Recent Items

* Looked for a new home for three weeks, was consistently rejected for three weeks, fought a lot with the Jady I love, "I am not living at fucking Rupert and 37th for fuck's sake," almost got a place that is west of East Van, the top applicants were "just a little bit better," got a place for real today in East Van where I guess I must belong, at Frances and Victoria, next to a really good Italian market where the feta-stuffed peppers don't cost an arm and a leg or even a lot of money, where I can buy these extra-small cans of Unico tuna that won't give me mercury poisoning even if I eat them every day because they're so small, where I can buy single Baci chocolates and get fortune messages relating simplistically to love, things are better on the homefront, we have a homefront, it's a two-bedroom with a decent view of the mountains and our dumb glass city, nothing nasty according to the current tenant except "a spider last week," we didn't exactly celebrate because I stayted home "to work," instead I downloaded so much pop hip-hop tonight, right now for instance I'm listening to 50 Cent and drinking caesars, I'm feeling tired of a lot of things, I can't believe I still have another semester of school yet I can't believe I have only one left, feeling pretty nostalgic, talked a little while ago with Reba about listening to Godspeed while high in high school on prescription speed, a sort of stupid August, I am missing a lot of people, another fabulous hip-hop song is "The Next Movement" by the Roots, another one is "Work" by Gang Starr, okay.

* Learned to make Thai hot and sour soup (Tom Yum Goong) from scratch.

* Made healthy bread (wheat flour, sunflower seeds, other ingredients from Capers) from scratch.

* Underwent acupuncture for the first time. Felt supremely relaxed for, oh, the fourth time.

* Hiked to the most drinkable possibly-undrinkable waterfalls on Wednesday with friends:


Drank them anyway. So did Jady. He had a terrible stomach the next morning so I bought him a bottle of Pepto Bismol, secretly because I like the taste and sick magic-mud smoothness of it and because I wanted it for our future shared medicine cabinet, since I believe in being in a serious adult relationship where you wash your own cups, and ask if the other person doesn't mind if you listen exclusively to Frank Zappa for ten days in a row and talk about becoming a Zappa scholar and actually get your partner's enthusiastic support for this, and where you eat prawns and scallops often, and listen to 50 Cent, and bitch about shirts, and intend to go buy tomatoes on 'the Drive', and make pasta sauce collaboratively, and always have the Pepto Bismol at hand, just in the medicine cabinet. I also like how something so pink ends up making your poo so frightful black.

* Went to Metrotown, also for the first time. Ordered and enjoyed "The Works" at New York Fries. Hated so bad on so many strangers.

* Started reading Ulysses.

* Attended a bike-in screening of a bunch of animated short films in an empty dirty lot on the 300 block of West Hastings. Wish you'd been there, if you weren't.

* Quit Pizza Pops.

* Got myself addicted to Diet Vanilla Black Cherry Coca Cola instead.

Book Questions

One book that changed your life:

The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir

The Opening of the Field, Robert Duncan

One book that you've read more than once:

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin

One book you'd want on a desert island:

The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang

One book that made you laugh:

Birds of America, Lorrie Moore

One book that made you cry:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

One book that you wish had been written:

Spring, Simone, and Crushing on Donne (illustrated memoirs), Phyllis Webb

One book that you wish had never been written:

So You Want to Write a NOVEL, Lou Willett Stanek, Ph.D.

One book you're currently reading:

A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen

Wittgenstein's Ladder, Marjorie Perloff

One book you've been meaning to read:

The Men, Lisa Robertson

Willing to Convert?

Dear Ella Steponas

I was dreaming an epic snooze-bar dream of you and me this morning until Jady ruined it by demanding, from his dream, "But what should we do about the mystery of the frozen family?"

I'd returned to Toronto except it was 'Ottawagona' and had found your house on Tromley Drive. Your dad was still an unusually hot dad.

Unfortunately, my arrival was a day too late: you'd had your First Communion just yesterday! I was sorry to have missed it, and had lots of questions for you about your new life with Jesus, which you weren't very good at answering.

I think I'd wanted to go to a rave, but you talked me out of it and instead we tossed water balloons to each other all afternoon on your front lawn.

Please Google yourself and write me a letter!

Get a Load of All the Productive Emailing I've Done Tonight

Baby Baby

Grandma's Where the Home Is

Today I walked around all naked in front of my grandmother for the first time since I was six or ten. It simply didn't cross my mind, stepping out of the bath, to not walk around all naked in front of her.

She'd come by to bring me an oscillating fan, pudding cups, cherries, and hot pink boxes of Kleenex. That was at two o'clock. She is still here, scraping carbonized cannelloni off the walls of my oven, boiling cherry stems into tea for her gallbladder, being hyper and funny and clairvoyant. Her mantra for this day: "Everything is very nice and you are pretty pretty."

At first I think she was embarrassed to see me completely naked. "Oopa, I did not see a lot!" she cried, eclipsing her eyes dramatically with her forearm. Tanned and confident, however, I explained to her that Jady has recently converted me, and most of his friends, into happy nudists.

"There's this beach near UBC he likes to visit on his days off," I told my grandma. "A lot of homosexuals go there."

"I loved once a homosexual," she sympathised.

She also loves the Brian Eno track "Dead Finks Don't Talk." We listened to it on repeat for almost an hour while she asked me a lot questions about absinth.

Un Plein Jour

Maintenant je suis à Paris et Paris est merveilleux !

Hier était un plein jour. D'abord j'ai été conduit par le tunnel où la Princesse Di est morte; alors j'ai été présenté à une grand-tante lesbienne et brillante (elle est une psychoanalysiste et ressemble au Gertrude Stein un peu) que je non jamais réuni avant; alors j'étais en café Les Deux Magots en tant qu'élément de mon pilgrimmage de Simone de Beauvoir; et alors j'ai fini vers le haut dans le L'Olympia voyant Sigur Ros!

Regardez!

I Am Trying To Leave Praha

Madonna with Fingers on Andrea's Crotch

For Canada Day

For Canada Day, I went with some American students to a Hare Krishna gathering called Happy Fest, drank five pints of Czech beer, took photos of couples making out, pretended to play hacky sack, and bonded with stray dogs and babies. My new friend Phil had told me he'd attended a high school across the street from the Twin Towers, so sitting with our toes in the Vltava and watching the sun set over the castle I asked him a lot of morbid questions about that.

Then we went to 'Confessions,' a weed bar run by a Nigerian named Kenny, and spent the rest of Canada Day with SICK MOTHERFUCKERS watching the France/Brazil game on a twelve-inch TV set. Following France's victory I played some foosball, danced to Dr. Dre and Naughty by Nature, and successfully turned down the advances of Kenny, who held my sweaty hand a lot and wanted to "get to know" me.

K. "Is zey anyone at zat table of yahs who will wont to meyk troeble?"
A. "No, but I'm a lesbian and I think you're too serious!"

Now I'm happily, safely home and about to go watch a dreadlocked and flatteringly large-bummed Mexican girl dance with fire on the roof to French rap probably.

On the Six-Cornered Snowflake

Johannes Kepler believed that the soul of the earth emanated the essence of the number six.

Tonight, so did I.

More Vicki!

Vicki is packing for her departure tomorrow to Croatia, and just said the best thing:

"Alright! Now there's nothing on this fucking desk that isn't garbage, charging, or jam!"

Vicki's just got everything so straight.

She would never think to turn into literature any of the funny and surprising things that come out of her mouth, but I would.

If you want to meet Vicki, she will be staying with me in Vancouver from 20-22 July. We will be eating a lot of tuna nigiri.

Baszameg!

Today was good and I am bronzing well. Spent six hours at the cafe reading mediocre articles on contemporary Czech literature that I am planning to critique and offer some fabulous theoretical alternatives to in my paper that is not actually started but is due Wednesday; learning my thirty-five Czech verbs and their invariably irregular conjugations for the joke of the exam I am to write on the same day; staring at hot people; perspiring endless beads of unsmelly perspiration; talking to Vicki about idiots that are not us; and drinking Pepsi cola.

A few people in my group just rolled in from their weekend trip to Budapest and are unanimously declaring Budapest superior to Prague in every way. By now everyone knows that my family is Hungarian, so I am feeling (and probably being) very smug. I extended my trip recently by a few days so that I'd be able to visit Budapest too. After Paris (3-12 July), I will fly back to Prague and immediately catch a train to the city that is better than Prague. My friend Gaspar will pick me up from the train station, it will apparently be his birthday, and I will have tried to bring him cake. Failing cake, I will recite to him all the phrases I know in Hungarian, of which most are terribly dirty.

I am hoping to return to the Szoborpark this trip, now that I've actually learned something about Eastern bloc Communism and Eastern bloc post-Communism and know how to bring in the Frankfurt School to ruin all my picnics.

Here is one of the weirder photostreams I've yet stumbled upon in Flickr.

(It no longer matters what breed my future dog is to be, so long as my future dog is similarly afflicted with a perpetual wink.)

Re: i got the humanities travel award!

Dear Andrea, Thank you for this marvelous news. We congratulate you, and mostly for your hard work, consciously and understanding that, the soil, rain, sunshine, and care giving are part of the development of flowers which could be the result of the growing of the future desired FRUIT.

What you get, is a recognition for a real hard work what, and how you did it, because you had a goal towards which you followed the choised path. Follow it, in the way you developed it with your own experience, and the advices, accepted from your tutors - indifferently if they were your parents, grandparents, teachers, colleges, friends, as expressed verbatim or written or printed words, or presented pictures. Give all of them the proper respect and continue to accumulate the knowledge you could share with the same interest an love of you, as you got and received them.

We congratulate and we love you for all you did, and and will do in the future, wishig you, to come true and be realized your credo and desire written as end sentence of your letter: ( I STILL HOPE I GET MORE !!!).

With love, your grandparents : -Marti and Tata Stefan

Depressing News

It seems unlikely that I will lead a happy or exciting life if the question of the 'ex libris' bookplate -- What ontological assertions is the bookplate making? How does Language feel about that? -- is already keeping me up at night.

We saw an exhibit of 'ex libris' bookplates recently and it is making me ask the stupidest questions.

I bought the catalogue so that, if I needed to, I could always write my dissertation on my stupid questions about 'ex libris' bookplates.

Vicki

Vicki kills giant moths in the nude and wipes their pawnee powder from her palms onto the kolej linoleum onto full-length mirrors, and whatever's left wipes onto her thighs.

Vicki is going to go to the London School of Economics in three years and then to law school somewhere but is going to learn Mandarin and Spanish and French and Swahili in the meantime, which sounds like a mean time to me.

Vicki has four older brothers and comes from Vancouver Island.

Vicki was a star rugby player and wrestled competitively before breaking her knee off in March. But she's strong as a fox about it. As a TERRY fox.

Vicki is a Type A personailty without being an Aardvark, and generally strikes me more as person than as ality.

Vicki just planned out me and Jady's trip to Panama this winter in less than five minutes. We will fly from Seattle to San Jose (Costa Rica), catch a direct bus down to Panama City for $50 USD (leaves at 6 p.m. or at midnight) that will provide for eighteen hours of meditative sightseeing and handsqueezing and napping in each other's laps and reading Pound if you're Jady or Beauvoir if you're me or Dave Eggers if you're neither of us and I am jealous and annoyed and insecure, and we will end up saving over a thousand dollars in flying, which I hate anyway.

Also, Vicki doesn't get nervous trying to figure out Sixth Grade 'real life' math problems, and is going to be richer than me, and is going to know more about the Middle East than me, and is going to want to analyze electoral systems more than I am, and is going to never, ever commit suicide. But I will always know more about Simone de Beauvoir.

Vicki is watching the big hockey game downstairs and I am writing about her on the internet.

Go Vicki!

Happy Father's Day, Father!

I sent you a postcard but it's not as good as this.

Museum Night

Last night was Museum Night in Prague. Countless museums and galleries stay open till 1 a.m., provide shuttle services between venues, and offer free admission.

There is only one stranger in Prague whom I've seen around (on the trams, in the cafes) more than once. He looks like Brandon Lee would have looked a few days after his death (gaunt, thin-lipped, sad to be dead) and I'd tentatively named him Jiri, since that's what most Czech people seem to be named. In my first two weeks here I ran into Jiri five times, got obsessed with trying to figure out what I was supposed to say to him, and finally convinced myself that I was supposed to say nothing to him and forget about it. I stopped seeing him places and read The Sexual Life of Catherine M. instead.

Anyway, Museum Night, I step onto the lazy person's tram (the #18, one stop over the very walkable bridge) and there's Jiri sitting in the back, looking dead and beautiful, just as I remembered! I get very nervous and try not to stare. He doesn't seem to be with anyone so that worries me even more. I grab a seat adjacent to his and finally notice the female midget sitting in front of him. Usually, when there's a midget riding your public transport, he or she tends to be the first person you notice when you board -- unless your special magnetic stranger happens to riding, too. So I had two people to fixate on, and wished I was taking the #18 much further into the city with them.

I cannot adequately express my shock at seeing Jiri, just moments after I'd settled into my seat and realized there was a female midget sitting in front of him, reach out to her, squeeze her tiny taut shoulder, and whisper something into her ear. Then kiss her neck!

Paralyzed, I couldn't have been more relieved to be taking the #18 only one stop over the bridge.

The three of us (each taller than the other by a good two feet) got off together. Jiri evidently has the same taste in photography (which would never have occurred to me otherwise), if not in women (which would never have occurred to me as possible), as I do, so I wasn't surprised to find myself entering the Rineke Dijkstra exhibit with him at the Rudolphinium.

Seeing Dijkstra's portrait work in giant blow-ups was really humbling and disturbing.

Seeing Jiri and his midget lover stare together at Dijkstra's portrait work was really humbling and disturbing.

There is a horrible lesson somewhere in this. Bet you Dijkstra's next cycle of portraits will have everything to do with little people.

So...

A thing that I’ve been keeping secret is this: I HAVE BEEN DOING SO MUCH SHOPPING IN EUROPE FOR CLOTHES.

I have like seventeen new shirts.

When I come home I am going to be wearing so many interesting shirts.

I am basically filling my loneliness with shirts.

P.S. Please, if you care about your life, watch a Czech film called Intimate Lighting (1967).

I Am Blogging Oh Boy Oh Gosh Am I Ever

I still don't have a computer, so am still using my roommate Vicki's and feeling much like a father enjoying only limited, usually supervised visitation rights with the child that bears a stronger resemblance to me than to its mother, and also loves me more.

I had expected this afternoon to pick up a rental laptop from a Czech called Honza, but things with Honza have unfortunately fallen through. I am pretty sure that Honza, who wears head-to-foot denim and keeps his right pinky nail at about the length of my bangs, is a raging cokehead. But I can't get into the specifics of this story as I'm expecting Vicki home from Auschwitz any minute now, and almost all her friends and family are currently on MSN, waiting to help her take my baby away.

Basically, I didn't go to Auschwitz with Vicki this weekend because I wanted her computer all to myself.

Anyway, Honza WAS my friendly contact at the Globe cafe and bookstore, which I've been visiting quite a bit. Most recently I went to a book launch there for an English language collection of short stories by Czech women, drank beer with a skittish Philadelphian named Lizzie, and printed off a bunch of travel insurance claim forms for my disgusting knee problem, which I also don't have enough time to write about. So it had been a rather important place for me till this afternoon, when Honza fucked me and all my business over.

However, if anyone back home wants to lend me $100,000, I would be in just the position to take ownership of the legendary Globe, fire Honza, and spend the rest of my life in this beautiful city, surrounded by books and attractive people drinking the right amount of beer. I am absolutely serious. Two million koruna is peanuts.

Luckily, in the past couple of days I've found a new and better spot to park my bottom all afternoon and drink forty-cent cappuccinos and read my Kafka and Kundera (seriously, they are making us read them) that is neither the drafty, moldy Kolej Komenskeho nor the legendary schmegendary Globe. It is UNIJAZZ.

UNIJAZZ is better because it is by no means a 'spot for ex-pats'. That means they do not play house music and invariably assume you speak English. Instead, they talk at you in Czech until you say "NEROZUMIM, PROMINTE," which means "I do not understand, excuse me," which is my favourite thing to say, and play music that you have never heard before but is the best music you have ever heard. You even have to buzz a buzzer to get let in. Then they are like, "How is it become that you know about UNIJAZZ?" And I am like, "the Internet."

Frankfurt 'Security'

8 May 2006:


21 May 2006:

So I'm not much into using my laptop or going to the university to use the lab that is 40 celcius and not open on weekends or to the internet cafe that is full of dirty men and costs me precious koruna. I am also not into dealing with this piece of shit, sold to me by Charles University for 50 koruna ($2.50):

In fact, the worst thing that has happened to me in Prague was obtaining this monitor on my third day in the city, trying to take "the much more faster way" home, failing, carrying the monitor without even a box across three bridges, crying in public, getting ripped off by a cab driver, almost leaving the monitor on the side of the street but then convincing myself that Jan, who sold it to me, would surely spot it on his way home and be insulted, then finally finding my way back to the dorms and having the thing not work when I plug it in.

I am trying to find a new machine.

I am also getting away with writing my term paper on Simone de Beauvoir, comparing America Day By Day with Eco's "Travels in Hyperreality" and various other essays on the critique of kitsch. I am absolutely contaminated. Frankfurt versus Paris versus help me not become a Beauvoir scholar.

I have been writing a lot, but on paper. I seem to have less attitude on paper. I will edit some passages to make it sound like I have attitude and will post when I get the chance.

To see some photos I've taken, go here.

Na shledanou.

Strange Magic

On the 20 bus yesterday afternoon, a slight but dapper older gentleman approached me and asked what my favourite pizza in the city was. I told him, "Amadeus, but that's on Granville Island. Around here I like Pizza Garden."

"Ah, they make a nice pizza, but they are Turkish who own that, and they killed a millions of my people. And many still deny."

"So you're Armenian?" I guessed. He had sculpted eyebrows and a scary voice, so it wasn't too hard to figure out.

"I am."

How could I not be immediately drawn to him? This man didn't even need to ask if I liked pizza; what he needed to ask was which pizza I loved the most.

We talked about the European Union and how Turkey wants to join. I had little opinion on the matter, and apologized for that. I told him I was going to Prague on Sunday. He smiled and nodded and gently gripped my forearm.

"Do ten or fifteen push-ups every night when you are there. You must have all of the body strong, not just the legs from the walking."

This astonished me, because push-ups are something I do every night anyway, even when I'm drunk. "In fact," I cried, "I plan to do forty!"

Then he cautioned, "And do not drink as much as you like to drink in Canada."

How could he have known? "This is something I've considered," I said. "Really. I realize I have to be careful."

"Be very careful," he insisted. "Your friends and your family will need you for many years."

So I shook his hand and stepped off the bus quite certain I'd met with with my guardian angel.

Now I see that a plane full of Armenians has just crashed.

So my plane probably won't.

From Sugarbush, Ontario

Good things happen when you lend a six-year old named Hannah your camera and advise her to "shoot close":






I am home now.

If you are my friend, I promise to call you after I've done my taxes, bought groceries, returned library books, and dealt with my imagined meningitis.

Future Dog

Last night before bed I decided I had to figure out what kind of dog Jady should get me. Although Weimaraners are probably the prettiest kind, I have also learned that they are incredibly high-strung and that they'll even, like my ideal pet bird The African Grey, self-destruct when sad. I don't need this kind of reinforcement. Plus I realized that any time I've spotted a Weimaraner around town, their owners have invariably been jogger yuppies or douchebags with Range Rovers. That is not me, and I can't yet say for sure whether I want that to be me.

So I settled on a Scottish Terrier. Until I discovered this:


Obviously, I have the wrong taste in dogs. But how about a Bloodhound? They are relatively lazy and enjoy hanging out at home and overeating. We could work on these things together. And I have always taken to dogs whose faces get me feeling desperately sympathetic -- all the more so to those whose necks are "very well muscled" and have "pendulous dewlap."


Then Jady actually got into this and suggested I do a search for "dreadlock dogs." Jady used to have dreads, before I met him, and in fact so did I, so shit, why not?

Turns out that the dog with the meanest dreads of all is the Hungarian Komondor. (That's a Komondor gracing or disgracing the cover image of Beck's Odelay.) And I like that "a Komondor will routinely greet someone it has not seen for years as though it had just seen them yesterday. Once you are a 'member of the flock', you are always a 'member of the flock'." Which is far politer than saying "You're either with us or against us."

So it's decided:

"The women writers, their heads bent under the light / work late at their kitchen tables."

I can only listen to both discs of Chopin's Nocturnes and both discs of Stars of the Lid so many times and write so many meandering sentences about TRANSCENDENCE before I have to eat an entire block of cheddar cheese and also a Pizza Pop.

I am so gross these days.

I am even getting eczema, I think.

My supervisor mentioned on Monday that he'd spoken to "Phyllis" and told her that he'd send her my paper when it's done.

I am definitely getting eczema. On my face near my chin. I will continue to not have my paper done, and my eczema will spread:

Did I brush my teeth today?

Probably not.

"I sit in my quilted jacket calling the birds / whose warning cries strike just beyond the window."

"Heidegger, notes of music / in his name."

I made this and am actually going to use it in my paper.

While I'm at it, I might as well use this:

and this:

Card For My Matey

In the SFU Information Commons

I am so jealous right now of the three Chemistry majors sitting behind me who are debating whether "Vitamin B12 has not shown" or "has not been shown" to blah blah blah my small intestine. If I could write actual words with my farts, I'd fart out "THE LATTER" into all their blonde hairdos.

Webb posited in 1955 that the poet "is like a genie: he can live under any circumstances, if necessary, but when he is given his freedom—and freedom in his proper climate—then he can work his magic." What I am left to debate is whether the poet really is like a genie (and whether, if that's the case, my sultan pants will last that long); whether Webb's notion of freedom has anything to do with the existential freedom I think I'm talking about for twenty pages of my paper; and whether or not there is any fucking magic!

Jady's on his way to school to meet me. He needs an article for his paper on some facet of Chechnya or Islam that I don't understand no matter how well he explains it because all I am able to understand right now is that existence precedes essence and that genies are better off free. I am stupid in so many things, like history and geography and Vitamin B12.

Tomorrow it will be a year since I traded my soul to Eric for Jady's email address and sent him a card with Aleister Crowley sporting a Photoshopt eyepatch: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of your birthday." It was an agonizing period of my life, that crush-keeping. That keeping of To-Do lists prioritizing such items as "kill J.D.'s girlfriend" and "marry J.D." A year ago today, I didn't even know how to spell his name.

My bum is really asleep.

Thank you for reading my lab report!

Silent Supplication

It is Jady's birthday next week, so yesterday I bought him a red hoodie like he's been wanting. Then I had to buy myself a new dress that is stripey green and so flattering that I will be too embarrassed to ever wear it.

Then I bought him a first edition Selected Essays by his spirit writer, William Carlos Williams. Then I had to buy myself a first (US) edition Prime of Life by my spirit writer, "The Beaver":

Sartre decided I had a double personality. Normally I was the Beaver; but occasionally this animal would be replaced by a rather irksome young lady called Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. Sartre embroidered this theme with several variations, all of which ended by making fun of me. In his own case, things very frequently got him down--especially in the morning, when his head was still foggy with sleep, or when circumstances reduced him to inactivity: he would hunch himself into a defensive ball, like a hedgehog. On such occasions he resembled a sea elephant we had once seen in the zoo at Vincennes whose misery broke our hearts. A keeper had emptied a bucketful of little fish down the beasts's throat, and then jumped on its belly. The sea elephant, swamped by this internal invasion of tiny fish, raised tiny, hopeless eyes heavenward. It looked as though the whole vast bulk of his flesh were endeavouring to transmit a prayer for help through those two small apertures; but even so embryonic an attempt at communication was denied it. The mouth of the great beast gaped, and tears trickled down over its oily skin; it shook its head slowly and collapsed, defeated. When Sartre's face took on an unhappy expression, we used to pretend that the sea elephant's desolate soul had taken possession of his body. Sartre would then complete the metamorphosis by rolling his eyes up, sighing, and making silent supplication: this pantomime would restore his good spirits.

After shopping I went to that sushi place on Granville that is sort of expensive and ordered the last six tuna nigiri I will ever eat. At the urging of my father, I am quitting this fish; I am wacko enough without having mercury poisoning, and need to keep my brains together as I am planning to master French and become a Beauvoir scholar. I ate my lunch with great ceremony, thanking the tuna with every bite for being the only raw fish my palate ever loved. "Your texture is so tolerable, and you take to wasabe so good," I told it.

Fare thee well, tuna. Gochiso sama deshita.

“A lucid generosity is what should guide our actions.”

The sky is green with rain and I am an existentialist!

News

A neat thing I figured out this morning was to have half a lemon handy while I'm working on my big paper.

What I've discovered is that by squeezing lemon juice every ten minutes into my throat I can alter the course of nausea by redirecting all that confusion at the pit of my stomach to a more sublime experience within my tastebuds, mitigating one kind of discomfort by means of a clearer and louder shock. This is keeping me wakeful and clean, this lemon, though I'm planning to eat a BigMac meal pretty soon. As soon as someone brings me one.

Orientation

Spent the day at an orientation for Field School participants. They had SFU Career & Counselling ladies come in with Powerpoints and lots of spelling mistakes to tell us not to eat raw chicken in our host countries, to wash our hands in our host countries, to avoid anal sex with strangers in our host countries, because "a condom can break" in our host countries. Additionally, us girls were reminded to "always wipe from front to back" -- no matter what country we're in.

They also had us do a shoddy version of the Myers-Briggs test. Actually, I really enjoy taking personality tests, IQ tests, really any test that is based not on data but on how rad and sensitive I am. I used to be INTP but it turns out that my adult self has blossomed into a INFP. That means I'm Feeling now.

I must admit I was surprised that there were so many (at least five or six out of thirteen) members of the Prague group that I could instantly tell I'd be able to bond with. This is rare even in a class of thirty, thirty-three.

And I told everyone how one of my greatest expectations of the Prague Field School is improvement to my blog, I was that eager to make friends. And the best part of all is that 35% of my Field School grade will actually be based on a "travelogue."

My Dad Doesn't Comment in My Blog, But He Does Send Me Things Like This

My Grandma is Gorgeous

My grandfather got a box of old photos together for me yesterday, many of which I'd never seen before. It just about makes my heart explode how beautiful and impossibly kind this woman is.