Hemlock B. Bootsalotta

you know you're over-extended when your to-list includes "sleep"

botulism@virulent.org — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:21:37 GMT

Things I did not manage to get accomplished this week

The to-do list that was supposed to be finished by last weekend

Slug-proof my garden

See my girlfriend

Call my mother

Catch up on my email

Start my mix-tape

Cook snails

Clean off my desk

Run

Get enough sleep

Things I did manage to get accomplished this week

Remembered to take all the proper medications at the proper times in the proper amounts

Finish my first week of pushups

Fill the freezer

Get my resume in for new job

Renew the mortgage

Got 50% of the way through everything on the to-do list for last week

Clean the bedroom & bathroom enough to host Australians

Work a six-day week

Not fall asleep on my desk

Not hit Axel

Not hit anybody else

I've decided I'm designating August as an appointment-free month. No doctors, no specialists, no tests. If it falls off I'll just staple it back on until September.

G is for Green and for Growing and for Garden

botulism@virulent.org — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:31:20 GMT

I HAVE PLANTS! And they aren't dead yet!

Well, not all of them. I managed to kill off the four biggest of my tomato plants by giving them sunburn. Who the hell knew that plants could get sunburn? It certainly never frikkin' occurred to me, until all the leaves turned white and crispy and then fell off.

But I managed not to kill the other ones off yet. And after spending two days clearing weeds and flowers out of the bed, my back is killing me and I have a half-dozen tomatos and some basil and pepper plants comfortably ensconsed in the back yard. And every day I go out and glare protectively at them and cover the leaves in soap solution and today I'm going to buy some epsom salts to pour around the stalks in a valient attempt to keep the damn slugs off of them. Apparently slugs love basil. Another thing I didn't know.

While I was outside today I also picked up some more snails. Note that this was just what I spotted in passing, without doing any actual hunting around.

I now have about 30 of them. It has been yet another educational experience. I had NO IDEA anything that small could produce so much poo.

for some reason this immediately made me think of disastrid

botulism@virulent.org — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:07:32 GMT

I have already forgotten who just pointed this site out. Help?

look at that S car go

botulism@virulent.org — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:01:19 GMT

This picture is from one of our pig roasts. We have hundreds of snails in our backyard.

So my question is; does anybody know if they are edible?

(I know they eat really well. Mostly because they eat all my plants.)

do a new thing every day

botulism@virulent.org — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:41:24 GMT

I just had my very first ever experience with a Neti Pot.

Weirdest. Sensation. Ever.

Music quiz

botulism@virulent.org — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:49:26 GMT

1. Reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

the_axel gave me 'J'

1. Justice Keepers: Bad Brains
2. J. B. Witchdance: Masters Of Reality
3. Jock-O-Rama: The Dead Kennedys
4. Just Lust: The Buzzcocks
5. Jesus Was Born (On An Indian Reservation): Big Stick

Best laugh I've had today

botulism@virulent.org — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:41:26 GMT

From loltheorists

medical question

botulism@virulent.org — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:43:44 GMT

What would you eat if you were told to stick to "soft" foods?

All I can think of is soup and yogurt.

78 More Sleeps

botulism@virulent.org — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:10:17 GMT

G is for Gettin' Paid

botulism@virulent.org — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:54:11 GMT

Stolen from kightp

1. Babysitting. Sucked at it. Didn't do it very often

2. Got a job briefly helping one of the guys from the ROM make casts of dinosaur bones. That lasted about one day until he made a pass at me. :-p

3. Restocking books at the school library. I think I got $1.50/hr.

4. The school board hired some of the students to revamp the school's entire inventory. I think I even got minimum wage for that.

5. Worked for SCOPE (School Community Outreach Program For the Elderly) doing errands and small jobs for elderly and disabled individuals. That was where I experienced my Scariest House In The World and Holiday in Cambodia stories.

6. Somewhere in there I turned 16. And armed with a new SS number, I got a job doing telephone surveys for a company called Canadian Facts. It was a really interesting place to work - lots of writers, actors and other people trying to make ends meet. Also lots of punks and freaks who liked having work that didn't require changing their clothes.

7. Packing and shipping for a company that made decals. Their biggest line was those things you put on the top of the windshield of your car that tell you what kind of car you're driving.

8. A factory that made life vests. Once again in the shipping department.

9. A sausage factory. My job was to go into the drying fridges and scrub the mold off of the racks of sausages with a wire brush and power house. I barely lasted a week. I couldn't eat sausage for about 10 years.

10. A doughnut shop. Lasted less than a week. Couldn't eat doughnuts for about 15 years.

11. Picking strawberries. I got paid by the basket. Lemmie tell you, if illegal immigrant labour is getting less than what we did, then they are subsisting on air. I made less than $1/hr for back-breaking work.

12. Waitressing. Which gradually progressed into bartending. For about um, 10 years? Worked in nice upscale restaurants, worked in shitholes, worked in stripjoints. Found out that the classier the place I was working, the worse the customers treated me.

13. The Pharm. I worked in a vaccine lab; with polio, measles, HIV, RSV and PIV. This is where the White Rain story happened. Stayed there for about 10 years.

14. A new media start-up. In QA. Lasted about a year before the company folded.

15. Canadian Blood Services. Broke my back.

16. LD50. Broke my brain

19. And now at the bank.

I need one more for an even 20.

What I'm listening to right this second: Supergroove

F is also for Floozy

botulism@virulent.org — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:46:35 GMT

You know, every time the_axel plays the Evil Dead soundtrack, I find myself wondering why it is that whenever there is a slut character in a play/book/movie, she is always portrayed as dumb.

Why can't it ever be a smart woman who just happens to have a somewhat greedy taste for the pleasures carnal? Why is the default assumption that those two personality traits must always be diametrically opposed?

Is it just because the writers who pump this shit out have never met any?

Siobhan "I was a turbo trollop and still managed to graduate" NiLoughlin

I can has new time-waster

botulism@virulent.org — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:54:05 GMT

The new alt.gothic wiki is a fantastic way to kill, oh, days worth of time.

No wonder I never actually manage to accomplish anything useful.

question from sheepthief

botulism@virulent.org — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:47:02 GMT

Going back to that question thing.

This is the fabulous 29 Dufferin Bus.

Note the scenery in the background of this photograph. Now, if you are located in the northern hemisphere anywhere south of the Arctic Circle, look outside.

This gives you an idea of the time lag between taking the picture and getting around to posting this response.

It's entirely possible I'll be able to drag this out for an entire year.

Congratulations!

botulism@virulent.org — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:56:44 GMT

to all the Californians.

F is for Fetish

botulism@virulent.org — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:02:56 GMT

A friend on LJ made a post a little while back that got me thinking about fetishes. The post was basically said Friend reacting very strongly to somebody showing up at a fetish night wearing a Nazi uniform. Friend was extremely offended by the dress choice and strongly condemned the individual wearing it.

My very first instinctive reaction to the post was to be surprised.

After all, one of the defining characteristics of a fetish is that it isn't under conscious control, right? And the whole point of why fetish events got started in the first place[1] was so they could provide a safe space where one can explore all the dark, oogie, uncomfortable[2] places in one's psyche. Where people with fantasies about violence or humiliation - things they could never inflict on a non-consensual partner - can instead be acted out in a structured environment. Where people who are fascinated by inappropriate lust-objects can do a little harmless role-playing and not hurt anybody.

The idea of being turned on by role-playing a Nazi is pretty disturbing. But I figure that it's kind of inevitable that somebody - or maybe a whole bunch of somebodies - would eventually develop that kind of sexual association, given our culture's apparent fascination with the power and abuses of Hitler and the Third Reich. And it's certainly not the only disturbing fetish that is openly explored at play parties. Pedophilia isn't exactly what I'd call socially acceptable, but the image of the Catholic school girl is so common in fetish events that I've seen entire theme nights based around it.

So this is all the stuff that initially goes through my head. And then the second thought hits, and I remember. The person who made the post is part of the goth/industrial community. And goth/industrial fetish nights have nothing to do with sex. They're all about dressing up in PVC and going dancing.

So what friend was offended by was not some guy coming to terms with the problematic parts of his sexuality in a safe environment - it was some dork who thinks Nazi dress looks cool at a club.

Never mind then.

OTOH, it did make for some interesting dinner conversation later. And as the_axel pointed out, any time he's ever met somebody wearing any kind of Nazi regalia - they've turned out to be a Nazi.

[1]In the queer community. At least in Toronto.
[2]Or to be more accurate, where other people can explore the dark, oogie, uncomfortable places in their psyches. I keep mine firmly repressed.

E is for E.S.P.

botulism@virulent.org — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:04:59 GMT

I used to date somebody who was really big on the concept of taking a stand. He believed very strongly that most people are apathetic or cowardly when it came to confronting anything wrong or unjust, that the world would be a better place if more people were willing to call out bad behaviour when they saw it.

I had the experience of growing up in the era when cops wouldn't press charges in cases of "domestics" and when teachers and doctors refused to get involved even when I flat-out told them what was going on in my house. So this kind of commitment to getting involved pushes a great big button for me. But after a while I started to come to the conclusion that in his eagerness to take some kind of decisive action, he didn't appear to be all that interested in making sure he knew what the best action was to take. He just wanted to be doing something, and once he had made his mind up any new information was deemed to be making excuses. I was frequently confused by his conviction that he could pick out the guilty parties in a dispute where (in my mind) he really didn't seem to be in a position to know what had really happened. When he started making pronouncements about events that I had witnessed and he hadn't I finally decided he was full of shit, and that was the end of my emotional investment in his desire to take a stand on the side of righteousness.

I bring him up because he was an extreme example, and because, well, extreme or not he's an example of something that I see all the time. People seem to want a conclusion, any conclusion. When the OJ trial was going on people would occasionally ask me whether or not I thought he was guilty. I would respond that I didn't know, I hadn't been following the case. "But what do you think?" they would persist. They seemed baffled at the idea that I could honestly have no opinion. I, for my part, was baffled that seemed to want me to have an opinion based on... air or something.

I am probably especially conscious of this kind of thing. One of the ways in which I carry around my damage is that I am extremely over-sensitive to feeling like I have been convicted without benefit of trial. I can't count the number of relationships (friendships and otherwise) that have ended because somebody decided they already knew What I Did - and for bonus points Why I Did It - without deigning to ask me about it first. As soon as I feel like I'm being called upon to justify somebody else's versions of my actions, I pretty much immediately lose all interest in having the discussion at all and that's not really conducive to working things out.

So when I see people taking sides on a issue - any issue - the first thing I want to know is what they are basing their conclusions on. And a lot of the times the answer is information sources that I honestly don't know how to evaluate. What it looks like from my perspective is that people are putting a lot of faith in third- or forth-hand reports - whereas I tend to assume that even people who were there don't necessarily have the whole story. Or that people are making the emotional decision to believe person X over person Y because they simply like person X better - whereas I tend to assume that even the best of people screw up and make mistakes and misunderstand things and make errors in judgment.

It's possible that I am hyper-critical of information. I do happen to believe that most people usually try to tell the truth. I just don't believe that people unfailingly know what the truth is. If you've ever read Stranger in a Strange Land there's a passage where somebody asks a character in the story what colour a house is. She responds, "It's painted white on this side." That's me.

And this disconnect happens often enough that I've actually started to wonder if there is some additional information going around that I just don't have the skills to access. I mean, the whole time I was growing up I kept running afoul of all the unwritten rules that nobody ever explained but that everybody else seemed to understand through some kind of osmosis. It took me many years of watching people to figure out just how much information is transmitted non-verbally. Maybe this is another one of those cases where I'm missing something that is so obvious to other people that they can't even articulate where they got it - it just becomes yet another thing that "everybody knows".

Or maybe people just have ESP.

ramblin' ramblin' man

botulism@virulent.org — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:19:20 GMT

Two out of two medical professionals think the_siobhan's current meat-suit is potentially salvagable. I rate that as a good day.

So to sum up; stomach issues sorted, skeletal issues sorted, respiratory and mouth issues in progress. Next thing on my check-list is to find out why my eyesight is suddenly deteriorating[1].

You know what else they don't tell you about getting older? The fact that it's so damn time-consuming.

[1]Oddly enough, I can view the prospect of going blind with a lot more equanimity that I can losing my teeth. I've been told by doctors that I would eventually lose most or all of my vision[2] since I was in my teens.

[2]Although in all probability, all I really need is bi-focals.

radio-free vestibule

botulism@virulent.org — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:36:31 GMT

It's been radio-silence around here lately, I know. Mostly because my CPU has been caught up with a bunch of pretty heavy real-life stuff that's going on. Nothing I can do about any of it, but it's keeping me kind of preoccupied.

I do have some good news to share. I got the referral I wanted to an asthma specialist. Two weeks ago I went for pulmonary testing; which consists of sitting in a pressurized Plexiglas box and breathing through a tube. It was utterly fascinating. Today I got to meet the respirologist, and I love her. She is incredibly thorough, listens carefully to everything that is said to her, and has the_axel's trick of explaining absolutely everything three different times in three different ways to make sure I completely understand it. (Unlike with the_axel, however, I didn't poke her in the nose to make her stop.)

Her first recommendation is that I go for something that is called something like an "induction test" if I'm remembering it correctly. Basically they will make me have an asthma attack in the lab so they can see what happens. Does it make me weird that I am really looking forward to this? Scientific experiment with me as the guinea pig. Fascinating.

Observation: Mount Siani Hospital has a "Sabbat Elevator". I don't know why that didn't occur to me before I actually spotted it, but it didn't.

For my next trick I go see the periodontist in a couple of hours. I probably won't want to talk about it unless the news is good.

ugh

botulism@virulent.org — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:32:09 GMT

I have the plague

Again.

Well, at least that explains why I pooped out early on Saturday.

content generator from iamjw

botulism@virulent.org — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:57:34 GMT

A list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded but you never actually crack the cover.

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. (I did both where I read the book in school, but I had already read it on my own beforehand.) Put an asterisk * next to the ones you'd read again or recommend to someone, even if you originally read them for school.

Added by me: Since this is the list of the top "unread" books, I'm going to add a # to the ones that I own but haven't read yet.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods*
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera*
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath**
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel**
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things ##
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five**
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

things I do not want

botulism@virulent.org — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:33:58 GMT

What the fuck good is it to have the super power of being able to tell what's coming if you don't have the super power of being able to effect the outcome?

request for assistance

botulism@virulent.org — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:54:51 GMT

This request is specifically directed to those people on my f-list who are trying to lose weight, especially any who are doing so by calorie-counting.

Could you please take me off the filter for those particular posts, or else put the details behind a cut-tag?

Due to some other stresses in my life, the annoying 20-year-old in my head who thinks vodka and speed are the only two essential food groups has made her re-appearance in her special slot in the DMZ part of my brain. Just recently she's started actually sounding kind of convincing. I very much want to cut off that shit at the knees, because a 45 year-old with an eating disorder is just fucking embarrassing, thanks.

This isn't meant to single anybody out. It's my issue, I'm just asking for some help with it.

In slightly more positive news, today I got notification of my first date with a respirologist. We are about to become very close. Asthma can suck my dick.

[EDIT] FYI, other health related or exercise related posts are fine. My ED issues are specifically around calorie-counting and limiting food.

D is for Dishabille

botulism@virulent.org — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:37:06 GMT

All you people who maintain the illusion that I'm some kind of a bad-ass would completely change your opinion of me if you ever spotted me while clothes shopping.

I am hard on clothes. I wear them until they are close to tatters. I have one(1) pair of jeans not mended with patches, and only because I need something decent to wear on casual days at work.

Part of the reason for this is that I hate hate hate clothes shopping with a deep and passionate vitriol. What I want to do is walk into a store, pick up what I need, pay for it and leave. I can do that with music, books, food and power tools. What I can't do it with is clothes.

Unfortunately I'm at the point where I really can't put off the task of going shopping for very much longer. I was down to my last two functional bras - except that on one of the them the underwire pokes a fresh hole in the fabric every time I wear it and starts creeping up and out the neck of my shirts. I've been patching the holes up but the fabric is now more spiderwebs of threads than anything else, and it's just not working any more. And on the other one I broke the underwire - snapped it in half - over two months ago.

So now I'm down to no functional bras. And last weekend I finally screwed up my courage to visit the store where I normally buy such items. Where I have been secure in the knowledge for many years that even though I might hate the process, I at least know their stock and approximately where everything is kept.

It's closed.

Shit.

OK, I can handle this. I'm a capable mature adult. I asked a few female friends were they go to buy underwear and since I just happened to find myself downtown yesterday after work, I made the last-minute decision to get this over with. I think the "last-minute" part is where the fatal error occurred.

I walked into the department store. I held my breath to hurry past the perfume aisles the way I always do, consulted the store map, and then took the escalator to the forth floor.

And found myself surrounded on all sides by women's unmentionables of every possible shape, size, fabric, colour and construction. Rows and shelves and racks of lace, cotton, polyester, boning, pleats, bows, straps, pink, red, black, white, blue, purple, striped, piped, patterned, reinforced, polka-dotted, strapless, topless, padded, belted, scooped, propped and ribboned.

I froze.

A salewoman made a vague meander in my direction and I bolted.

So I'm sitting here making this post while my underwire gradually creeps up my cleavage and tries to stab me in the neck. And I know I will have to go back to the store and try again.

I just need to psyche myself up for it first.

And maybe have a couple of belts.

And carry a power tool in my pocket. Just for comfort, of course.

question from emzebel

botulism@virulent.org — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:25:58 GMT

Remember this?

emzebel asked me, "Your dream job."

That's the "National Drunk Writing Night" logo on the screen there.

This is only my latest dream job of course, I've had a bunch of dream jobs over the years. Some of 'em I've even tried out for a while.

So I'm slowly plodding away on actually, you know, writing something that I might consider trying to get published. I have a plot that I've been gradually adding bits and pieces to. In between renovations and doing taxes and cleaning up mouse poop.

The drunk part, of course, I've pretty much had down for years.

ughhhh

botulism@virulent.org — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:13:14 GMT

I swear that I am going to bed early tonight if I have to hire somebody to come over and shoot me with a tranquilizer dart.