Faking Sanity

It’s bigger on the inside!

Posted by perian - 31/03/10 at 07:03:40 pm

I have decided that I need more hours in my day. A TARDIS would be nice, or even a whatchamacallit from Harry Potter. A Time Turner? Then I might actually get things done.

Oooh, a TARDIS would also be very handy as a library, so I could head off somewhere, read all the books I want to, and then come back just after I left. That would be fabulous, but I suppose I would age faster than everyone around me. So, I’d need to be a Time Lord (Time Lady?) But I don’t actually think that would be a lot of fun.  You know, with the whole everyone I love dying on me thing.

Is it obvious I couldn’t think of anything to write about today?

I can’t even explain how true this is

Posted by perian - 30/03/10 at 07:03:32 pm

And sometimes I reserve the right to just post a funny comic instead of getting my thinking gear on (make sure you read the hover text):

I love comedians…

Posted by perian - 29/03/10 at 11:03:10 am

I have this issue when I’m on the internet — I tend not to comment on people’s blogs, reply to tweets, respond to Facebook statuses*, etc because a) I don’t think what I have to say is all that important and b) I don’t want to look like an idiot. But I’ve been trying to get over that, so I’ve been posting a few comments on Mark Watson’s blog and on Saturday I commented on Adam Hill’s blog.

I’ve mentioned Adam Hills before, but currently he’s doing a series of stand-up shows in which he just messes around with the audience. Shows I would kill to be able to see, but given that I’m in Calgary, Canada and he’s in Melbourne, Australia that’s not going to happen any time soon. But luckily for me, he posts really fun summaries of his shows to his showblog, which I look forward to reading. On Saturday (possibly Friday for me, I’m hopeless at the time change when it involves losing or gaining a day) I decided that just leaving a comment saying how much I loved it couldn’t possibly make me look like an idiot. And, well, everyone loves a compliment, right?

This morning I checked his blog to find this:

Hello to my blog followers, and in particular to a lady in Canada who left a message after yesterday’s blog. I am chuffed to think that someone on the other side of the planet is reading this blog – so I’d like to start tonight’s blog with a photo I took of the audience waving to Cindy in Canada:

Hope you like it Cindy!

Yes, yes you could say I like it!  *grin*

An audience at the Melbourne Internation Comedy Festival is waving at me, while one of my favourite comedians ever takes a picture of it. What a fucking awesome way to start my day.  Also, that just solidified my so far vague plans to try to make it to Melbourne for MICF next year!

_{* Yes, I totally checked to see if that the proper way to pluralize status. Just shoot me now.}

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body*

Posted by perian - 29/03/10 at 10:03:55 am

Whoops. I wrote this yesterday but forgot to post it. So, two posts from me today.

I read. A lot. I mean, you’d probably guess that, since I run a bookstore, but it’s not necessarily a requirement. I’ll read pretty much anything, though the quirkier the better. The bad thing is that I’m completely unable to review them coherently.  I either like a book or I don’t.  I read a few books on my holidays, but these are the two that really stuck out for me:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley completely lived up to all the great things customers have been telling me about it. A 70 year old man writes from the point of view of an 11 year old girl and makes her one of the most interesting characters I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in quite a while. I’m so glad this is the first in a series, because I didn’t want this book to end.

“…it occured to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
- Flavia deLuce

Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit by Matt McCarthy was one of those impulse buys — I was in Florida to watch baseball spring training, so I figured I should read something baseball related. A really fun read, with the added bonus of teaching me lots about the whole draft thing.

_{* Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710}

If music be the food of love, would you like fries with that?

Posted by perian - 27/03/10 at 07:03:17 pm

The obsession with Spicks and Specks which has taken over my life for the past few months has been having a massive effect on my music library as well. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about music, having pretty much missed the 80s and 90s entirely.  And it’s not like I’ve really been listening to mainstream music in the 2000s either.

A quick snapshot of my music growing up: my parents listened to the Beatles, Kenny Rogers, Anne Murray, and ABBA. My eldest sister listened to Glass Tiger and Bon Jovi (my other sister listened to a lot more, but since I avoided her most of the time I wasn’t exactly exposed to it.) I had the MiniPops. The only radio station in town played country music.

In grade 4 my best friend got me hooked on Kiss for a little while, then I went back to being music-less. And then in middle school a friend gave me Anonymous Confessions of a Lunatic Friend by Brian Duncan (he thought the title sounded appropriate for me) and introduced me to  Christian rock, which is pretty much all I listened to until I graduated.

Since then, I’ve slowly started picking up music here and there, mainly Canadian. I’ve had an excellent introduction to contemporary folk music through the Calgary International Folk Festival and friends and family. But mainstream rock still eludes me.

So what do I do if I want to learn about something? I find a book, of course!

Yesterday I picked up 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and my goal is to listen to as many of them as I’m able to get my hands on. Not the full thousand, obviously, but at least 10 from each decade. I may even write about them on this here blog…

Without obsession, life is nothing*

Posted by perian - 26/03/10 at 07:03:30 pm

I am a serial monogamist when it comes to my obsessions. There have been many, many obsessions over the years, from Tolkien to the Czech Republic, and often one obsession has lead to another. For example:  P.G. Wodehouse -> Jeeves & Wooster tv show -> Stephen Fry -> QI ->Sean Lock -> 8 Out of 10 Cats -> Jimmy Carr -> Would I Lie to You? -> David Mitchell -> Mock the Week -> Ed Byrne. And that lead to Ed Byrne mocking my driving skills after I rolled my car on the way to see his show.

The newest obsession actually branched off of that example too. I first saw Adam Hills on Mock the Week and thought he was funny. So I did what I always do: check what else he’s done. And through the miracle of YouTube, I found his Characterful and Joymonger show. What a revelation — a comedian who could be absolutely hilarious without being nasty, who left you feeling uplifted at the end of the show. With the added bonus of a removable foot! How can you not love a man who crowd surfs his artifical limb while singing Footloose?

You can’t be a fan of Adam’s for long without hearing about this Australian music quiz show he hosts called Spicks & Specks, so that was the next place I headed. Luckily for me, YouTube came to the rescue once again with entire episodes. And now I’m obsessed. I’ve tracked down every episode I can possible get my hands on (153 at last count, though there are some I’m still missing, dammit!) and watched each one multiple times. It is the perfect blend of music and comedy, with the three best regulars on TV today. Adam is charming and funny as the host and Myf Warhurst is brilliant and adorable as one of the team captains. And then there is Alan Brough…

Alan is my newest celebrity crush. You know you have them too — it doesn’t matter if you actually know nothing at all about the actual person, but from how they come across in on tv/radio/interviews/etc you just want to hang out with them, maybe have a drink and an intelligent conversation (okay, so sometimes it’s not exactly a conversation you want to have with them.) He’s intelligent and funny and nice and laughs out loud and… well, you get the picture. I won’t embarrass myself by continuing, but I will just say that if he wore glasses he’d be my ideal man. I’ve started listening to his radio show on ABC Melbourne and like him even more — he seems genuinely interested in everything, from zombies to romance novels.

_{* John Waters}

I’m baaaaaaack!

Posted by perian - 26/03/10 at 09:03:57 am

Back from vacation and catching up with piles of stuff at work. 100 days of blogging to commence tonight! Watch this space.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark*

Posted by perian - 14/03/10 at 09:03:46 am

This past week has been a little bit crazy, as I had an inventory at the store (and all the prep and post that go along with it) and was also trying to get ready to leave for Florida on Tuesday night. But now the inventory is done and dusted and I have the big, important things for my trip: passport, travel insurance, US cash, and books to read.

I don’t really have a topic in mind to talk about today, so I just thought I’d do my normal and blather a little. My roommate pointed out the other day that I’m great at starting blogs, not so great at keeping them going. In fact, she doesn’t think this blog will last longer than 3 months, so now I have to prove her wrong!

In fact, I kind of want to challenge myself even more than I had planned for TYSIC. When I get back from my vacation, I am going to commit to blogging every day for 100 days. I would start today but I’m not sure about internet access while I’m gone.

The strange thing is that it’s kind of nice to know that no one is reading this blog. Maybe someday there will be, but right now I haven’t really promoted it at all, and I like it. I don’t have to worry about if it’s entertaining or not, I can just babble.

 _{* Ralph Waldo Emerson}

Not all those who wander are lost

Posted by perian - 09/03/10 at 12:03:04 pm

One of my other challenges for TYSIC is to visit 10 countries I’ve never been to in the next 10 years.  Given that I’ve never been much of anywhere, that means countries other than Canada and the US.¹ I’ve been wanting to do some travelling for years but I could never afford it. So my holidays are split between driving “home” to see the family or doing something pretty close-to-home with my friends. Or the occassional paid-for-by-mom vacations.

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to my debt and my living expenses are pretty minimal, so soon I will have actual disposable income! So I’ve started planning: opened a savings account, did my budget, bought a guidebook to Australia…

There are a few places I definitely know I want to go:

1. Montreal – yes, I know it’s not a different country (well, unless you’re speaking to certain Quebecois) but I’ve been listening to my roommate talk about how amazing it is for years. So I want to go to Just For Laughs and scoot over to Ottawa to do the museums and maybe go whale-watching. But that’s definitely a go-with-someone trip (the roomie, obviously) and so any planning for that has to take someone else and their finances/work schedule into account.
2. London. And the rest of the UK² as well, but London is a good place to start. I’ve been studying British history for so long that I can’t resist going to see all the places I heard about. Tannis and I have already started planning this one, but again it’s for sometime in the future.
3. Australia. I’ve always kind of vaguely planned on going there, but given the amount of Spicks & Specks I’ve been watching lately, I’m going to have make this one my first solo trip. I’d like to go to the Melbourne Comedy Fest and then basically just hang out — see the scenery, people watch, avoid beaches…
4. New Zealand. And not just because I’m a LotR fan.
5. Prague. I’m fascinated by the history and the architecture. And, hey, a good place to start a train trip around Europe, yes?

So maybe, possibly, if I put these ideas out there into the internet ether, they will actually happen. Or possibly I’m deluding myself and I’ll just keep driving up to Dawson Creek every year. We shall see.

<sub>1. Truthfully, I have been to Mexico as well, but only to Tijuana which I don’t think actually counts. So if for some unknown reason I decide to go to Mexico in the next 10 years, I’m going to count it.
2. And don’t get me started on whether England, Wales, Scotland, and N. Ireland count as separate countries.</sub>

Here we go again…

Posted by perian - 06/03/10 at 09:03:29 pm

My grandma died this past fall and when my mom and I started going through her stuff we found a stack of diaries.  She had written in them every day for the past 25 years — nothing big or life changing, just the little things that happened. Golf scores and which of her grandkids had called, major purchases and who they’d played cards with.  Just looking through them made me want to do the same thing, though maybe not in the same form. As much as I love neat looking journals, I’m incapable of not losing them within a week, so I decided that what I would do is start a blog. Just a simple place to babble about whatever’s going through my brain, accessible from any computer.  And then I procrastinated for 4 months…

But then last week Mark Watson issued his Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge. TYSIC is, in his words:

It’s as simple as this: you nominate something which, over the next ten years, you would like to accomplish in your life. It could be an aspect of your personality you would like to change (mine is – more of that tomorrow). Or it could be something quite specific, like learning to drive. Or it could be something really stupid. But you have to genuinely want to do it.

I came up with three goals, the first of which was to start and maintain a blog for the next ten years. To post regularily (at least a couple of times a week) about whatever I want. I am currently part of two shared blogs, one knitting-related and one book-related, but I needed somewhere that I could just blather about anything, without rhyme or reason. So here it is.

Welcome to my brain.

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