What is art?

Thanks to Ze Frank for tweeting about this.

P.S. Happy Fourth to my American friends and relatives!

Exam stress

Does anyone else who has been out of school for years still suffer from nightmares related to The Exam For Which You Haven't Prepared? I would far rather dream about being chased by evil, fire-breathing, infectious-disease-carrying, smelly zombies every night than have the exam nightmare ever again. It's just too real. Real, that is, in my head. The exam is always for a course I've never taken, on a campus I've never seen, with instructors I've never met. And yet it scares the bejeezus out of me and I wake up in a cold sweat, feeling like I've just failed the most crucial test of my life.

I have certainly experienced exam jitters in my day, and I have shown up for more than one test feeling inadequately prepared, but the outcome has never been so grim as to justify these continuing nightmares. In fact, I usually excelled at school, nerd that I was. The one vivid memory I have of giving up on a test halfway through makes me laugh rather than cringe. It was for a third-year East Asian Studies course at university. I had been too busy cramming for other mid-terms to devote sufficient time to this one. I came across a question regarding the I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes. I was asked to name the other Chinese classics. I remember sitting there, in the second row of desks, thinking, "Book of.... what? I have no idea. Book of... matches. Hee hee. Yeah, Book of Matches." I wrote that down. Next I wrote The Book of Love, the Book of Cookies (the special feature at a local bakery which was being widely advertised on radio in those days), Guinness Book of Records, Book of the Month Club... any goofy thing I could come up with.

Short on knowledge and even shorter on sleep, I began to regard my silly answer as terribly amusing. I tried to suppress my snickering. Naturally, it grew from snickering to chuckling to guffawing, all internal, and then it burst out of me in the form of a very loud snort. Typical. Still shaking with laughter, I packed up my things, handed in my test, and left the room.

Thanks to that experience, I'm a firm believer that sleep deprivation and exam stress can lead to hilarity. Just have a look at these prime examples of the toll taken by exam stress.

Suivez-moi

Won't you follow me? It would behoove me if you would. I updated my Blogger template just for you, after all. Don't you like it, all shiny and new and improved? So boost my self-esteem, won't you? Just click on that little "Follow" button on the right. The one that looks like this:

Make me feel like I have friends. Make me feel worthy. Give me something to live for! Please! Why are you making me grovel? You've left me with no dignity. How cruel! The least you could do is follow my blog. Just click the damn button!

This brief display of desperation, pathos, guilt-tripping and aggression has been brought to you by Eli Lilly, creators of the fine medication that keeps me sane.

He made me flowers!

Early in our relationship, Scott used to bring me flowers all the time. It made me feel so special. One spring day, however, he came over and discovered that I had thrown a bouquet of roses out onto the back deck. I had done so in the winter, as the flowers had died and I wanted to scatter them in the backyard to allow them to decompose come spring. I throw like a very weak girl, however, so the flowers only made it a few feet from the back door. It didn't matter how many times I explained my innocent intentions; that was the last bunch of roses Scott would ever buy for me.

You can imagine how touched I was with the birthday gift that Scott gave to me today: he made me flowers.

I sure married a talented guy.

Down and dirty

This weekend is a long one for our friends in the U.S., but it was last weekend that Canadians celebrated Victoria Day, a.k.a. "May 2-4," the unofficial start of summer. (Very unofficial, seeing as summer is still several weeks away.) The May 2-4 weekend includes a holiday Monday courtesy of the late, curmudgeonly Queen Victoria. Traditionally Canadians celebrate three days of beer, barbecues and buddies. This year the weather was glorious: sunshine, blue skies, cool breezes. It truly could not have been more beautiful. Scott and I spent all three days in the basement wearing dust masks.

Once upon a time our basement looked like this:

Then, as you may recall, it looked like this:

...and then like this:

It has taken us many months to get our butts in gear, but we finally decided to gut the rest of the basement to prepare for, one day, putting it back together again. Early Saturday morning, one week ago, Scott set out to buy dust masks, unwisely leaving me at home unattended. By the time he returned, I had done this:

...forgetting, of course, that the whole purpose of the dust masks was to prevent the inhalation of drywall dust and mold spores. I also neglected to close the basement door, so every flat surface on our main floor was covered in a thin layer of white dust. Oopsy.

Scott came home, shook his head at me, and created our toolbox for the rest of the project:

What came next was two days of sweating, destruction and bickering, interrupted only by a pleasant evening with friends (Saturday) and then with family (Sunday). By Monday Scott and I had learned to get along, for the most part. Along the way we made some interesting discoveries, such as the window that had been hidden behind the shower:

...and the very old faucet that a previous owner had drywalled around instead of removing, leading to a gaping void between the foundation and the inner wall:

In addition to removing drywall, insulation, tar paper and rotten framing, I also tried my hand at ripping out lathe and plaster in the stairwell. Although the basement door was closed this time, we still ended up with plaster dust coating almost the entire interior of the house. Lovely. At one point I hit myself in the ankle with a framing hammer. This is what the bruise looks like a week later:

Geez, I really need to moisturize. Not to mention lose a few pounds. Anyhoo, in the late afternoon of day two I was exhausted and in dire need of a shower before we were to head to my parents' place. I was about to excuse myself, but I thought better of it when Scott picked up his reciprocating saw. If he was even just half as fatigued as I was, it wouldn't have been smart to leave him alone while he worked with a dangerous power tool. He began to cut the framing away from the copper pipes in the demolished bathroom. Suddenly, you guessed it, PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! he cut through one of the pipes and created a not-so-tranquil fountain. So much for my nice, hot shower. I turned off the water to the entire house and waited while Scott went to the hardware store for some copper and a soldering kit.

If there's anything more dangerous than a very weary man with a reciprocating saw, it's a very weary man with a soldering kit. It's only dumb luck that Scott didn't burn the house down. I stood next to him with a fire extinguisher the entire time he worked at repairing the pipes. The next day, for reasons I still can't understand, he decided to remove all of the copper pipes in the bathroom anyway, including the new piece he had installed. This is what the old bathroom looks like now:

By the end of the long weekend we had filled a 14-yard disposal bin:

...which was surprisingly comfortable after three days of standing on a concrete floor wearing old loafers:

This weekend was supposed to be far more relaxing than last weekend. Unfortunately, I had scheduled an energy audit for 9:00 this morning. (Believe me, had there been any other time slot available I would have taken it. Normally I don't willingly rise before noon on weekends.) The federal and provincial governments are offering grants for renovations that improve the energy efficiency of one's home, as long as one has an energy audit performed both before and after the renovations are completed. The grant program is for a limited time only, hence the urgency of having our audit done.

Part of the audit involves using a blower door to bring the house to negative pressure, which makes it easy to detect air leaks. I was horrified to imagine twisters of pet fur spiralling through the house and lodging themselves in the auditor's fan, so last night and early this morning Scott and I dashed about dusting and sweeping and mopping. Our efforts paid off: there was still plenty of fur but not nearly enough to clog the fan.

At one point the auditor asked to inspect the crawl space beneath our addition, as we are planning to add insulation and he needed to document that there isn't already any insulation present. (There used to be, but the raccoons who used to live there pulled it down to use as bedding and a toilet. I dragged most of it out of there a couple of summers ago.) As the auditor snapped a few shots of the unexpectedly stinky crawl space he said nonchalantly, "Dead raccoon." That would account for the flies. We already knew of one long-dead raccoon whose body was unreachable but also way past the stinky stage of decomp. This raccoon, however, was relatively fresh, and right in our faces. The auditor casually suggested that we might want to dispose of it. Thanks for the tip; will that be extra?

Once the auditor had departed, Scott donned his grubbiest clothes and a pair of thick work gloves and set about removing the corpse. He asked me to find a big plastic bag. After searching the house for a large enough bag (I'll never look at Toys R Us bags in the same way again), I returned to the driveway to find Scott dry-heaving. "I was fine until the maggots," he coughed. He had flipped the raccoon onto its side, which was decidedly not its best angle. (Sorry, no photos.) As I stood holding the plastic bag, wearing nice clothes and no gloves, I began to reflect on how this weekend was rapidly turning out to be lousier than the last one. I have resolved to do no other unpleasant tasks this weekend besides laundry (which will first involve moving the washer and dryer and reconnecting them). Oh, and I also have to clean the litterbox. And pick up dog poop. To hell with it, I should just go back to bed.

I saw a man kick a dog

That's right, I said kick a dog. He had the dog on a leash, the dog was being hyper and unruly and stepped on the man's sandal-clad foot, so the man kicked him in the chest. Granted the dog didn't so much as whimper, but still... What would you have done or said, dear readers?

LMAO...

...at the video below. Thanks to Rob K for drawing attention to this.

Writes the Huffington Post:

The "gathering storm" ad made by the National Organization for Marriage, which preaches against same-sex unions, has spawned many parodies in its short life. As Stephen Colbert said before introducing his version of it, "It is like watching the 700 Club and the Weather Channel at the same time."

Our own Lizz Winstead offered her version that shows the ridiculous leaps the ad makes in conflating the restriction of personal rights with granting marriage rights to homosexuals.

Now Funny or Die is getting in on the fun with a star-studded version that boasts Alicia Silverstone, Lance Bass, George Takei, and Sarah Chalke. The ad offers an answer to the gay marriage issue: a giant gay-repellent umbrella that will shield god-fearing Americans from the storm.

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

Just say YES...

...to exploring the benefits of wind farms.

Tomato, tomahto...

My co-worker's sister was recently telling her friend, a rabbi, about a movie she had seen. It was the story of Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe who escaped into the Belarussian forests. There they joined Russian resistance fighters and worked to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants. The rabbi was not familiar with the film but he was interested in seeing it. He asked for the name.

"It's called Deliverance," said my co-worker's sister. "You can get it at any video store."

She meant Defiance, of course.

I can't wait for chapter two of this story.

I FRY MINE IN BUTTER!

I have confessed how I can get when accidents happen during live performances. I am comforted by the fact that author Kurt Vonnegut was the same way.

By Kurt Vonnegut, from his book Timequake:

That the impulse to laugh at healthy people who nonetheless fall down is by no means universal, however, was brought to my attention unpleasantly at a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Ballet in London, England... A ballerina, dancing on her toes, went deedly-deedly-deedly into the wings as she was supposed to do. But then there was a sound backstage as though she had put her foot in a bucket and then gone down an iron stairway with her foot still in the bucket.

I instantly laughed like hell.

I was the only person to do so.

A similar incident happened at a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra when I was a kid. It didn't involve me, though, and it wasn't about laughter. There was this piece of music that was getting louder and louder, and that was supposed to stop all of a sudden.

There was this woman in the same row with me, maybe ten seats away. She was talking to a friend during the crescendo, and she had to get louder and louder, too. The music stopped. She shrieked, "I FRY MINE IN BUTTER!"

It has been almost two years since the death of Kurt Vonnegut. I'm still sad that there won't be more books from him.