and now for something a little bit different...

I've been feeling a little flustered lately... maybe it's the heat, maybe it's my messy room, maybe it's my sucky job and the dread of a potentially impending job hunt which is always depressing, maybe it's the music I'm listening to, maybe it's my potential being wasted, maybe it's my big daddy drivin me crazy... do you see why I might be flustered?

So today I'm going to just publish random thoughts... I'll keep this window open all day and type stuff in as I think of it.

Last night I got my air conditioner installed, and it was so nice it made the apartment so cool. Then this morning I discovered that my living room was flooded. So I had to unplug it, knowing that today would be the hottest day of the week. Didn't have time to clean any of it or even get a pail, couldn't get ahold of my work to tell anyone I'd be late so I had to leave it.

Also when I got home from work and signed into messenger, bd was still online... so we started chatting, and it was so weird to be at home talking to him. really weird.

I don't know if you know this about me, but I hate ambiguity. without ambivelance, I hate hate hate it.

What I also don't like is that I still have the same problems as I did a year ago, and probably a lot longer. I've grown and evolved but not as much as I thought. Not as much as I wanted to. Or not in the areas I wanted to. It's still on me to 'get off my ass and do something' as bd said months ago. It's up to me how I grow, where I go. You see?

The problem is that I don't hate my job. I hate lots of things about my job. Like the pay, the location, the ambiguity of my position and the structure of the company. I love a lot of the people I work with, I like my vendors and my customers... I like the challenges and the opportunity to grow beyond people's expectations. I hate, though, that there are people who have low expectations of me, have no idea how hard I work and how dedicated I am. I hate that there' s a guy who thinks it's appropriate to come beside me and sift through all my papers and ask me questions... never mind the context of the paper... it could be 4 months old and I'm filing but he starts up like it's a new order... has so and so ordered? and he has absolutley no idea of the details of the company's activities. What shortages I'm facing, how many phone calls, emails I have to return, how many orders and POs I have to process, if I'm having trouble lining up transportation, he wants me to stop and tell him all the orders I've gotten so far. I could just print a report, but he's turned that offer down. It's so irksome that because I sit at reception people treat my desk as a fucking lounge... it's not like I'm on the phone and it's not like I have a kajillion details to take on at any given moment and it's not like I could use the peace and quiet.

But. Then there's the person I love working with the most, who is back from holiday after a week and a half... the VP Ops who is so amiable, flexible, the most cooperative person I've ever met. He always maintains a sense of quiet, he knows how to talk to people respectfully and get his shit done effectively at the same time. And he relies on me. He sees me and he's suitably impressed by all the thing's other people miss because they're so busy looking for the worst in people. He'd have made an awesome starbuck's manager.

So would I have. I still regret not going for that. I still could. Tell me... opinions? I've been waffling on this one since christmas... someone kick my ass over to one side or the other! yes, jac, I mean you too.

I should close this mutha out now before it gets too long.

randomly yours,

Kristin

The Butler Brothers

The buzz on The Butler Brothers taken directly from their website...

Hollywood North Magazine has this to say:

About A & L: "The brash, unsentimental dialogue and bleak black and white composition of Alive and Lubricated creates a funny, insightful and raw look at the new suburban culture."

About Bums: "Bums crackling characters paint the genders as twins rather than opposites in a razor sharp snapshot of that gap between freedom and responsiblity."

That comment about the genders being twins, that makes me want to see this movie. I wonder if this was intentional... I love this idea. That the guys would portray men and women that way because that's how they inherently view things. Whenever I've talked to Brett, he has always spoken to me as an equal, never just wanting to brag about what books he's read (for example,) but wanting to know what I was reading too. So that would make sense. I like the girls in the trailer too. They just look confident, gorgeous, and smart. One of the guys in bums says "I find a smart girl more erotic than just some pretty girl, you know what I'm saying?" That's so cool. Smart girls sort of lose hope sometimes that there are guys who actually might give a shit about what goes on upstairs. Thanks Butler Brothers...

I was watching the trailers and, maybe it's the black and white, but I was reminded of Clerks. And that can't be bad. The dialogue is so sharp and different, just like talking to Brett or Jason... which is appropriate because they are the writers. Every line is a potential one-liner. Like this, from A&L "It's just lucky i amuse myself so much" and from Bums "you're the only one who gets you off, it's a sad, disgusting, narcissistic problem - get help"So to answer the obvious, yes, I'm ordering these DVD's really soon. Take a look at their site, it's gorgeous. I don't know who designed it but it's phenomenal.

Smart girls can be chearleaders too:
Goooooooooo Sub Prod!

Abolissons la Pauvrete Parte Deux: Get On Board

So I was watching The National and there was a piece about this grassroots movement called Get On Board. The idea of the movement was to travel to some of the poorest villages in Africa and take messages from them directly to the G8 leaders. And Emma Thomson was featured, saying that the idea that helping Africa and changing policy and providing aid is charity needs to change. This cannot be thought of as charity, that mentality is wrong. It is our moral responsibility to take care of African people just as much as it is to take care of Canadian people, to protect the unprotected from injustice. Poverty should be seen as injustice, not just misfortune.

The messages included pleas for education, empowerment of women, free anti-virals, and this one was my favourite: "G8 Leaders: Your guns equals to our poverty"

I've been following, and commenting on a weblog called Wizbang which turns out to be kinda right wing, but what the hell... and if you wanted to check it out and see what your brilliant pal kristin has to say... there you go. The initial post is called Will Live Aid End Poverty, and it pissed me off, as well as subsequent posts and I felt the need to comment.

so mainly what I'm thinking about is how poverty is not the real problem but the symptom of the problem. So yeah, we need to root out the cause and fix that. But in medicine you have to treat the symptoms and the cause more often than not. so while Aid may not be The Answer, it most definitely needs to be part of the package.

abolissons la pauvrete

First, just let me get this out of the way - a sentiment voiced repeatedly yesterday was that Live 8 organizers don't want our money, they want our voice. God gave us the gift of voice, not so that we should be silenced... as Neil Young sang so beautifully. So follow this link and sign the petition to add your name to the millions over the world who've done so.

This was not your every day festival type concert, so any review could not be a typical concert review. Steven Paige of the Barenaked Ladies said it best "This day is not about the music, it's about the message. But the music is rockin!" I have only like a half-complaint, and that is that nobody got a long enough set. Stephanie and I got on the bus at 9:15 and headed up. We got into the line-up just as Sam Roberts started his set and we heard pretty much the whole thing. Then as we went the long way around the bend, we missed the beginning of Bryan Adams set but got into the park in time to hear the last 2 songs which finale'd into an interlude of Tears Are Not Enough (which was the Canadian Musicians' collaboration for the original Live Aid) So we missed Tom Cochrane who was first and I think that's it.

But we were there for the worldwide snap-in. that was crazy cool.... you stand with 35,000 people snapping every 3 seconds in unison while knowing it's happening the same in philadelphia, london, moscow, tokyo, berlin, paris, johannesberg and rome and see if you don't get a little choked up. (the significance of the snapping is from the adverts, where celebrities were snapping every 3 seconds to demonstrate how often a child dies of hunger or aids or exposure in these countries.)

All the musicians did such a fantastic job, and when they spoke on the issues they really were eloquent. I understand that the aftermath of the media was to show people who were at the festival who couldn't answer the basic questions about the issues. they never asked me, and the people I was with; stephanie, jacqueline, jenn and cody. I just don't believe that the majority of the crowd were cluelessly there about the music... or just for kicks. The night before the concert, news coverage showed the first people to arrive at the park. And this 40-ish rocker type was sitting in his lawn chair with his wife and said "I just really believe all the love from these concerts is gonna reach the G8 and they'll do the right thing." I really do believe that was the heart behind everyone who turned up. You can't tell by looking at a person how deeply they feel about something. You can laugh at the naivety of that guy, or you can love him for it. If 26 million people (the number of signatures on the list around the time that the Barenaked Ladies took the stage) are all believing that they can make a difference, then I think we can.

Maybe poverty will not be 100% eradicated... If there is still poverty in Canada and the US then we would be crazy to believe we can eradicate it in Africa. But. Because there is no logical reason for poverty to exist in North America with the political systems in place, but you can understand where it could come from if you look at the exploitation and level of marginalization in these "third world" countries. (I was happily surprised to note that part of the Canadian make poverty history movement includes Canadian poverty. And you can go there too and sign up and send an e-mail to Paul Martin.) But. Aid does work, even if it's not the only answer and even if it cannot be the entire solution. In Johannesburg, we were introduced to a woman who, in the 1980's was a posterchild of the next victim of starvation... she was doomed... and now she is a graduate of University in Civil Engineering if I'm not mistaken. She studied in Africa and now she is there making a difference. You never know who you could help.

I will probably be talking about this for a while, consider that fair warning. It's probably okay, I'm sure y'all are sick of hearing about big daddy or whatever... I am and he's my crush. I want to close with this... Bruce Cockburn said (and I'm paraphrasing) "the cynical media has been telling us a lot... about how the aid we're asking for will never help the people we want to help because the countries in question are run by despotic and corrupt regimes who exploit their people and who benefit from the marginalization. But what we don't hear about, and people forget, is that those regimes are upheld by the very G8 leaders we are here to address today. If they stopped supporting these regimes they would fall. In a heartbeat." Basically, there are so many opinions going back and forth, so many editorials. but for heaven's sake this issue is not fodder for an op-ed page. these are lives in the balance. and it's time to do something. Even if more aid is the wrong thing, or not enough, it's more than what we're doing now.