Movie Idea

So, you have this girl and she's online dating. There's some sort of intro montage to let us get to know her and her dating situation super well. Probably lots of shots of computer screens with messages from guys that write all in caps about how no girls go for nice guys anymore and how they can't believe no one ever messages them back. Anyways, the details can be worked out. The point is we get the audience sufficiently invested in this girl so that when she goes on a date with a guy and he totally kills her the audience is like WTF, we were totally ready for a romantic comedy. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it's crucial that we market it as a feel good romantic comedy to really maximize the WTF moment.

Anyways, since our protagonist is dead about 5 minutes into the movie, we fill te rest with investigation. There's a lot of time left over, and as you'll see, I don't have many other plans, so we can spend a lot of screen time on dusting for fingerprints, or the paperwork that goes along with evidence bags.

So anyways, midway through the movie we go to her apartment and we find out that she has a total shrine set up to her murderer with his profile picture plastering her entire wall, with a message that says "he killed me." So, we find out that all along, she was the crazy one, with a shrine, instead of the guy that just goes around murdering innocent protagonists. He wasn't so crazy, minus the murdering, because when we make it to his apartment it's totally shrine free and he has a super cute golden retriever.

Then we find out they were long lost siblings all along.

It shall be called "Ferngully".

This is pretty much just a personal pep-talk, but you're free to read it...

By the way, I'm still alive. For the last month, I have frequently thought about my long struggling blog and imagined my triumphant return post-board exams. Then, today I thought, screw it, I will return pre-board exams (they start tomorrow...), while my brain is still somewhat intact and not crushed by 300 multiple choice questions aimed at pulverizing any self-confidence I might have left after 4 years of education. The jokes on them though ("them" referring to the abstract concept of the exam that I assume is out to get me, as abstract concepts often are), because hidden under my pigtails and love of Fraggle Rock is the soul of a warrior.

The evidence? Two weeks ago, I ran 8 miles on the treadmill with a broken iPod. The boredom would kill a mortal, but not me. Last Sunday, I ran 10 miles then got home to find the elevator broken. Did I break down and cry? No, I took the stairs for all 13 flights and still could dance that night. The point is, I'm a lot stronger than I look or act or generally say, excepting this blog which is pretty much all about how strong I am, perhaps to help convince me that I have the energy to survive 4 days of testing, or maybe because I'm just so tired at this point that I can't spare the effort to hide my deep seeded narcissism. Anyways, the point is that while exams can take my social life and any spare glucose I might have had roaming around my body to fuel my poor tortured brain, they will never take my happiness.

I wish they hadn't taken any ability to write a vaguely interesting blog, but give me a week and I might be back after a long absence...or I'll keep thinking about how hilarious my constant attempts at keeping this alive.

Oh, and in other random running pride, I ran 76 miles in January. I think up until this summer, I hadn't run 76 miles in my life. Point is, my life rocks.

Help Cancer Beat Playground.

Hello faithful readers! This is not so much a post as a request for you to take a few minutes of your time to help support a good cause. There is a project create a center in Ottawa providing Whole-Person Cancer Care Regardless of Income which is currently a semi-finalist for the Aviva Community Fund. Supportive care during cancer treatment can greatly increase the quality of life for people, but not everyone can afford it. Please, follow this link, then register to vote. You have a total of 10 votes and can vote once a day, meaning if you simply take a few seconds everyday to vote for the next 10 days, you could help to create a center that has the potential to improve the lives of many Canadians.

Currently, there are about 6 different playground projects beating it in votes. I love playgrounds as much as the next person, but really? How many playgrounds have cured cancer? Okay, probably one or two, because laughter and playing "the ground is lava" are the best medicine. Anyways, please vote for quality of life for many Canadians over playgrounds.

Maybe I have elevator rage, but I think it's righteous

Thought of the day: I have a great deal of disdain for people who press both the up and down button when waiting for the elevator to make it come faster. I know that there are rumors that doing that is the secret code that will cause the elevator to spew out any inhabitants and break the laws of physics to come to your beck and call, but most studies indicate that this belief is false. Mainly it will just make me have to stop on your floor when I'm in a hurry to get home so that we can have an awkward conversation about how the elevator is going up 10 floors and you only want to go down 2 so maybe you should wait for the other one. Please, next time you're waiting for an elevator, just press one button indicating the direction that you actually want to go. If it helps, imagine that the other button is actually a bomb trigger attached to some sort of something you would rather have not exploded. It will save us both time. Actually, it might only save me time, but that will save you my silent curses that probably don't do anything, but if they do, you're going to wake up hairless, so best not to risk it.

Not striving for quality or quantity, but simply existence

I've been trying to blog frequently since my last post, but I'm finding that between work, running, frisbee and studying, I just don't have the time to produce the free-flowing rambles I have become accustom to publishing. Well, I do have the time for them, just not time to write them down. If I could take all the thoughts that run through my head while I'm running and transcribe them, that might work, but I'm not yet aware of any thought extracting technology that could accomplish that for me, so they're generally lost to the ages by the time I'm home. However, one did stick with me yesterday, and that idea was that instead of trying to produce the longer posts I used to and failing, that maybe I should just periodically blog whatever random thing occured to me during the day that managed to stay until I had a chance to record it.

Actually, I lied, two thoughts stuck with me yesterday, that one I just mentioned, the shorter, slightly less coherent, posts idea, and one about how awesome my running music is. This occured to me as the non-dance remix version of Safety Dance came on. I also have a dance remix version, hence the distinction. Sometimes, if I'm pretty sure there aren't any people around, I'll spell safety outloud, because how can you not. If there are people around, I just imagine that I'm in the video, which improves my running since the people in it generally terrify me, and terror naturally leads to speed.

My exercise music is pretty much an accumulation of every song that has ever motivated me in my life that I have on my computer, which I think makes me cool. But as I was running, I thought that perhaps not everyone would realize exactly how cool I am, because only I can hear my music when that song they sing in the Muppet Movie when they're painting Fozzie's uncle's Studebaker comes on. So I decided to blog it. Which I just did. So there we go.

I think this new blogging will go well.

A Variety of Ways I hope not to Die in the Near Future

I've been working for 2 weeks to pass the 80 posts mark on this blog. It has not worked. I keep on thinking amazing blog thoughts, but it's always when I'm running or biking and I don't have my iPod to record them, so they are lost to the ages. I always say to myself that this one is so great that I will remember it for eternity, but it's not and I do.

I raced Shamus. He won the race, but I kicked teenage Sharon's ass, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I was so thrilled by the whole event that I signed up for a half marathon in March, partially to force myself to exercise going into the final days of studying for boards. The threat of dying trying to run a stupidly long distance because I haven't done the proper prep work will probably be enough to tear me away from my books for an hour a day, or at least to bring some cue cards to a treadmill. If not, at least I'll have something other than the potential that I failed the exam to worry about after it's done. I really hope I didn't sign up to die though, because a t-shirt is not worth much if you are dead, and I really want that t-shirt.

The other day, I brought a bunch of helium balloons home that were leftover from work, and by a bunch, I mean 24. Well, it would have been 24 had I not lost 3 in a tree on the way home. Things like that make me want to waste more paper, because, let's face it, trees are kind of mean. They've also stolen a few kites in my life. I wish they would just buy their own balloons and kites and stop taking mine, or at least stop complaining when we chop them down and use their flesh to make post-its. Whiny bastards.

Anyways, I walked home with many balloons, but was sad at the number of people who didn't even blink at someone walking down Sheppard Avenue at 8:30 with a whole bunch of balloons. It's like these people never had a childhood. Where was their unbearable envy of my situation? They didn't even have one helium balloon and I had between 21 and 24, depending on when they saw me. If balloons = happiness, I was an infinite amount more happy than they were. That's right, infinite. Unless they had one balloon that I didn't know about, then I was 20-24x more happy. Actually, now that I am home, I have 21 balloons most people I run into on the street are unaware of, so perhaps I just ran into all the balloon hoarders in Toronto who secretly knew that their happiness was equivalent to mine. That explains it. The good thing about hoarding helium balloons is that they won't fall over and crush you. That is what makes me not a hoarder, the falling and crushing aspect. Otherwise, I love random crap, so I'd be all over the hoarding thing, were it not for the sudden death by crushing and/or smothering that would almost certainly occur at some point.

My happy song for the last few months has been Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and other games) by Of Montreal. My roommate Byla also likes it, but I think it is because she is from the frozen North, so feels a deep soulful connection with Antarctica. I wonder if kids from the North try to dig holes to Antarctica instead of China. That would have made me work harder at digging, because penguins are cute. Wait, so are panda bears. But, the tie-breaking factor is that panda bears are bears and penguins are not bears, so of the two cute cuddly things, one is much more obviously going to maul me. Then again, I would have been in the north, where digging is much harder because of the plentiful ice, so the motivation probably would have just brought me to the same point that any attempt to dig a hole to China got, which was not ever particularly far, usually right around the bottom of my sandbox, at which point the wooden bottom posed a challenge I was too lazy to ever overcome.

Practice makes perfect.

The last few days have been a little bitter sweet. I'm back from my near death experience, which is good. I promised myself if I rested until Sunday night, I could go to my ultimate game on Monday, and rest I did. So, Monday night came and I was incredibly excited to play. I was there early to warm up, since it felt like forever since I'd played. But, apparently one of the remaining effects of my cold was either blindness or poor reaction time, I'm not really sure which, all I know is that I caught a disc right in the eye. It was a beautiful throw, if only I'd seen it on time to catch it, or at least to bob a bit.

Later it turned out that maybe the universe really wanted to connect my head with hard plastic flying objects, because another frisbee ricocheted off the top of my head, right into the hands of my team mate in the N-zone. That was actually pretty sweet. I knew at some point my erratic running in circles would pay off somehow. I got many high fives.

Anyways, I woke up today hoping that I wouldn't have a black eye. I was actually quite worried that the frisbee in the eye was the universes way of teaching me not to be too cocky, since I had commented that morning on the fact that most days it really doesn't make a difference whether I wear makeup or not, cause I'm just that gorgeous. Not only would a black eye force me to wear makeup, it would ensure that the entire process of applying it would be as painful as possible. Touche universe (I know I should accent that touche, but I've never really figured out how to do that...I should probably ask friends with accents in their names, since they probably have figured it out by now). But, to my surprise, I woke up with my eye still tender to the touch, but with no visible signs of bruising.

I suspect that despite being a ginger, I'm somehow immune to bruising. Maybe I just don't have enough blood. Or maybe it is also ginger and thus blends in with my skin. I'm not really sure about the physiology of this condition.

Regardless, I was pretty excited, and thought maybe things were going my way. No bruising, and I was going to finally start biking to work again after a week of walking/subwaying. My excitement must have distracted me from noticing the sky opening up to drench the city, because I ended up completely soaked less than a minute into the trip. Somehow I made it to work on time, changed and dry, with the squelching of my shoes the only sign of exactly how miserable I felt. Then, I learned that I would need to stay late and somehow figure out how to close the store. I clarified a few times that the main thing I needed to do for this whole closing thing was to ensure we weren't robbed blind or set on fire. I like to set small, acheivable goals, which is good, because at some point in my 10 hour shift, I became quite hypoglycemic and my brain shut off. Still, somehow eventually I managed to get the gate to lock and escape into the night.

But Melvina (my bike) was still waiting for me, and my hypoglycemic brain couldn't work my theft proof bike lock. And, in trying to open it without fully inserting the key, I managed to bend the key until it was unusable once I finally realized what I was doing wrong. I called my roommate Byla, desperate, and she offered to bring my spare-key on the subway, which probably saved my life, because the hypoglycemia was really starting to mess with my brain. While waiting for her, I realized that I had a bag of celery in my bag, which probably wouldn't help the blood sugar, but would amuse me for a spell. So, I sat on the wet ground beside my bike, eating celery and singing showtunes to stop me from crying while I waited for the most wonderful roommate in the world to rescue my bike. No one even looked at me twice. People are weird. I would have looked twice and then probably comment on how weird people are that aren't me.

Eventually my spell in purgatory ended, and I made it home. Actually, I made it before Byla, because there were subway delays. I love Byla, because she didn't kick my ass, even though she would have been in the right. This fact made me realize that although it seems like I'm going through a bad time, maybe it's not so bad, because it's when you have a really really shitty day and you're totally hypoglycemic and can barely see straight that you realize what kind of friends you have in your life. I realized I have good ones. Some people realize other things on days like that, and that is a real bad day. Mine was just a chance to practice being stoic. Next time I'll try to do it without singing Close Every Door from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But I can't promise anything.