this journal is mainly friends only. comment here if you think we'd make good friends. :)

(fyi at this time i'm not generally adding because i like to stay close to my flist and it's already difficult to keep up with)

so... adam and i are both po' so this afternoon i googled 'free dates' and was led to coolestdates.com. they do have a section for free dates. let me post their suggestions for everyone's enjoyment!


Free Dates (for Ages 25-29)

Go for a bike ride, either in your community or take a trail ride with mountain bikes. Take water and snacks, and take time to rest and talk. Enjoy the journey, rather than focusing on a destination.

Make a couple of pans of brownies. Then drive to various friends' houses and deliver a small plate of brownies to each friend and visit for a while. When it becomes too late to be visiting people, go home and finish off the brownies.

Baby-sit for a young couple so they can have a night out alone. Prepare a few games to play with the kids.

Go to the park and feed the birds. Take a bag of bread. Share childhood memories.

On a sunny Saturday morning, travel around the countryside and photograph special sites and serene scenery.

Go to a free concert in mall, school, church, or civic center. Check your local paper's entertainment section.

Go for a walk together either in a crowded city or alone in the country.

Go to a local animal shelter and play with the animals. Maybe you'll find a new friend together!

Find a muddy area, dress in your grubbies and have a mud fight. For groups, take along a rope for a tug-of-war. You might bring towels or sheets to put on the car seats for the ride back home.

Locate a large piece of cardboard. This can be found at a nearby furniture or appliance store. Curve the end up like a toboggan. Find a sloping hill of dry grass and slide down. Wear older clothes (grass stains can ruin nice clothes).

Want to perform a unique deed for someone? Go to a self-serve gas station and do all the work for the surprised customers. Make sure to get permission from the gas station attendant first.

Attend church functions together. Dances, discussion groups, and church meetings really help couples grow closer to each other.

Ask for help with your homework, delivering a note worded in the vocabulary unique to that subject (it might make sense to make sure he/she knows the subject).

yesterday in vancouver we had some pretty incredible weather. i have never in my life seen anything even remotely like this. it made the news and is now all over youtube, haha. so here's a very BIZARRE day in vancouver. it's only a minute long, and the second half is where things get really crazy. but watch the whole thing. the sky turned bright orange, it felt like the end of the world!!

how nice to have it coincide with the fireworks this year, lol. :D

i have so much to say that i don't even know where to begin. after many false starts, i'm just going to tell you what michael jackson meant to me.

when thriller came out in 1982, even my dad (who otherwise seemed to be allergic to popular music) bought the record. it was played regularly in our house. for some reason i had the idea that side B was actually side A, and to this day i generally order my thriller playlist beginning with "Beat It". i must have been about five years old when my dad faked michael jackson's signature on the record sleeve. he showed it to me with some smug excitement, but he didn't expect me to confidently declare it as a fake - after all, michael jackson's signature appeared elsewhere on the record and the two didn't match. nice try, dad.

my brother was also a big fan of michael jackson, and together we listened to the jackson 5 ('destiny' in particular), 'off the wall', 'thriller' and 'bad'. all on record, of course.

i associate 'dangerous' with my anna_rosa - my best friend at the time. i don't know how many hours we spent listening to that tape, from 'jam' through to the title track, while playing upstairs in her bedroom.

in my later teens, thriller (in my opinion, the greatest album of all time) became the soundtrack to some rather questionable behaviour .. i'll never forget singing along to PYT in the car while driving way too fast and doing things that weren't too smart.

his most recent album, invincible, had some great music on it but wasn't nearly as solid as his other material. 'you rock my world' is still one of my favourite michael jackson songs, and it was on the 'greatest hits' mix tape that i painstakingly made for my car that covered michael jackson's career spanning from his early days as a member of the jackson 5 until that time. that tape is still in my car, though it has been replaced by an updated playlist on my ipod.

it was only in the last year or so that i discovered HIStory (almost 15 years late) - here michael jackson welcomed us and begged us to get to know the real him ... his lyrics had never been overly personal in my mind, they told stories or held messages that were universal (such as 'smooth criminal' or 'heal the world'). HIStory was raw and personal - i was blown away by the candor of 'strangers in moscow' and, if you ask me, it is still one of the best songs he ever wrote.

this is what michael jackson means to me. it is, of course, impossible to ignore his odd appearance, his child molestation trials, the bashir documentary, his massive debt, his chimp, the baby dangling incident, his unusual marriages. i'm so pleased that the world was reminded today that in a free country, we are innocent until proven guilty. only michael and the alleged victims know the truth about what happened, but i will say this: michael jackson was a brilliantly creative and musically talented man who endured a lot of hardship and was a tragic figure. in a lot of ways, he never grew up. if he was in fact guilty, i don't believe that it was predatory, but a symptom of a sickness. at best, michael crossed the lines of propriety and was an easy target. i really believe that if he hurt anybody, it was not intended. nobody can argue that michael was always 100% in control of all his faculties.

after hearing his daughter's tearful goodbye today, i am ashamed to admit that even i questioned his ability as a father, even after his death. i thought that, while very sad, perhaps his children would live more normal lives now. what a horrible, ignorant thing to say - i said it because the only thing i knew of them was 'blanket' and baby dangling and the masks they wear in public, surrounded by an army of bodyguards and paparazzi. and, of course, what it was also influenced by what i perceived as michael jackson's mental instability, fixation on children and potentially unclear role. this coming from someone who loves michael jackson.

i do love michael jackson, warts and all.

but he still has his haters, even in death. give it a rest. get over yourselves. leave him alone. don't knee-jerk things you know nothing about. nobody knows enough about anything to make such horrible judgements. including myself, apparently.

this past week, instead of listening to random music on my ipod, i've been actively skipping ahead to michael jackson. and when i hear his music, i feel sad. i can't count how many times i've choked up on the street this week.

so rest in peace michael j... you've gone too soon.

Come to think of it I don't know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.
- Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot

june 13-22 ... i will be here!

sometimes i get the idea that i should start a food blog. i'm obsessed with cooking these days.

i have so many posts to make!

it's weird how quickly the student guilt is beginning to lift. between semesters, it would always be just as the next was starting that i would at last feel unburdened, only to be burdened again. i assumed it would take at least a month, but no... it's less than a week after finishing my final exam and i'm free from that base level of stress that all students feel, that sense that even when the body is at rest, the mind isn't, that there is always something that i should be reading or writing or studying or doing.

i thought it would be months before i picked up a book. i'm starting slowly but massively... i'm 100 pages into the crimson petal and the white and i'm remembering the things i read and enjoying them in a way i haven't been able to for years.

my last final EVER will be over at 1:30.