what the world needs now is sleep. sweet sleep.

or at least i do.

besides drowsily just walking right on to the wrong bus this morning and not realizing my error until 15mins later, i am having issues with conversational autopilot. i usually have some stock responses that i just blurt out when i'm too sleepy to actually formulate custom sentences all my own...

today this system is out of whack.
for example, i pass the guy i intern under in the hall as he is struggling with his hoodie.

him: i'm having sweater issues.
myself: (not thinking) oh, aren't we all.

he looks at me strangely. oh dear. i'm not wearing a sweater and that made no sense at all.

me: (desperate last-minute addition) I mean... deep down.

sometimes i wonder if it's all worthwhile...

it's not news that going to concerts is an imposition on my socially delicate (or indelicate) nature. all the things i hate congeal in front of the stage: dancing, people who feel empowered by music sing along, and lot of isgusting hair flying around (whether it's in the form of swinging dreadlocks that smell and look like dead puppies, or some hipster chick's horsey ponytail). there have also been instances of standing behind the one guy who isn't wearing deodorant, and of course the usual couples who assume the metronome dance (guy stands behind girl, wraps his arms around her and they swing left to right from the waist in unison. like a metronome. you get it...)


concert #1 - weakerthans reunion tour:
so distracted by horrible hippies around us, i remember all of ten seconds of song. like cats, the dreadlocked, patchouli sects of the college can sense i don't like them. i am of course the only person at this concert who is smushed between three dreadlocked, dancing freaks. gross. also a girl who danced "like she's being remote controlled by aliens."

concert #2 - final fantasy:
we knew it would be a hipster's wet dream, and sure enough the combination of black and white striped shirts crowded in one area kind of had an MC Escher effect... pressing closer to the stage it was also the dream of one guy who didn't wear deodorant (yeah that's the one...gross). we finally make our way beyond him, to the side, and i get stuck behind a guy who shifts from left to right so drastically that i have to swing in reverse just to see anything. there was less singing to the difficult-to-follow lyrics, but man oh man.

concert #3 - sunset rubdown:
last night - somewhat nightmareish.

broken city fills up with fans and it gets extremely hot, stuffy, crowded and the air was quickly depleted of all usable oxygen; stripped down to a dizzying form of warm grandmother-smelling gas by the time it got to our needy little lungs.

it also started extremely late. despite being told our band would probably take the stage some time around 10:30, the first of two opening bands began at 10. sunset rubdown didn't take the stage until about midnight. the first two were not enjoyable and the lead singer of the first really made me concerned for his vocal chords. i really want to make that man some soothing chammomile tea and stress the virtues of proper phrasing. we all know what happened to bob dylan.

and there we were, standing still in a sea of hipsters dancing like someone was attempting to re-animate their corpses through the use of significant volts of electricity. one girl especially, whose pony-tail kept hitting me in the face, had a freakishly stiled mechanical twitch that tossed her boobs around like she was some government robot with one purpose: fierce, painful jiggle-ry as a result of rapid, stiff side-to-side jerks and wrenching motions.

also noteworthy that the guy in front of me was dancing so spastically that it a) felt like he was humping me with his ass, and b) would inevitably lead to a midnight run to the hospital for skull collisions.

there are also the very personal impositions. example: a horrible little photographer who kept budging in front of us. she and the robotic jiggle-tron were in cahoots. the robot convinced her we would let her through if she asked nicely. why? because she has a camera? god no. i saw her cheesy motion-blur band photography. that was not happening. she asks if she can nudge in front and starts moving like we've already agreed.

i say, whoa... wait just a second. does your camera have a zoom lense?

um...no. well kind of but not really.

well. that's not our problem.

we go back to watching while she stands there looking in disbelief at the jiggle-tron.

honestly, the primary function of a concert is to provide music to attendees. not to provide a crappy photo portfolio to pathetic first year photo students. i think i had an easier time than rhianna, for once. usually she's the one half-singing and swaying while i stand there with my arms folded, scowling at people... this time it was half the opposite. not that i wasn't standing there with my arms folded, not that i was singing (i wasn't), but she was particularly complaintive and miserable.

we both have flashes where we strongly consider just staying home and playing albums very loudly...

click.

i'm never satisfied with how i leave people. goodbyes are such an awkward, uphill battle.

in person, on the phone... i'm not even sure which one is worse or more difficult. on the phone i try and deploy a little information followed by "bye". "i am going to do laundry now. goodbye." unfortunately, if the other person makes a comment regarding what i'm doing or just carries on one tidbit of conversation beyond this, i'm totally screwed and it turns into an awkward, panicking "well...okay, bye."

how do people say goodbye? i've tried

see you
goodbye
goodnight/day (work but sometimes i am distracted and get them mixed up- not often, but it happens and i'd like to avoid that)
take care (creepy?)
have a nice ___ (sounds incredibly false and a lot of times i second guess the last word and halt mid-phrase. doesn't help.)

it's hard to pick up anything from the media.

on television: they don't do it at all. phone conversations are the worse, ending on random lines like "yeah i can come for dinner." and then they just snap their cell shut. one, i cannot snap anything shut, since i don't have a cell phone and two, it strikes me as unusually hostile to slam a phone down. i attempted this one time on the phone with rhianna, but i may or may not have spoiled it with "i am going to do that television hangup-thing now!" i slammed the phone down and then immediately felt like i'd hit a kitten. i looked at the phone waiting for some kind of response.

in books: they rarely mention this part, or if they do it's in a clever sort of last line fashion that is impossible to carry out in real life without looking like a total twat.

in person: unless i listen in on other people's conversations, this doesn't work either, obviously, because i'm involved in the conversation myself. i'm involved and making it awkward. also worth noting: sometimes people take my goodbye strategy and i'm left empty-handed.

i've smoothed out so many social awkwardnesses (i think only rhianna's seen enough to lump into any sum of what a social retard kaylen is?), but it doesn't seem to matter all that much when you're this lousy at last impressions.

oh, those poor people...

i came across this little gem of a sentence in the nytimes this sunday. let it be a lesson to everyone who is reckless with 'and' sentence structures.

About 100 wild elephants converged on a river island in northeast India and were demolishing homes, feasting on sugar cane and panicking residents, officials said Saturday.


hee. i actually looked up for a moment at rhianna and said, puzzled, "I didn't know elephants ate pe– oh. oh wait."

(whole article here : elephants )

this land is our land.

coincidentally, today is 'national grouchy day' as well as 'blog action day'. in order to celebrate both, i am attempting to take the ultra-earth-huggy list on hippie-o-rama and, well, do what i do.

right off the bat: unless you're doing something big like curing cancer or making a time machine, it doesn't matter how many little things you do. "smile and smile back"? whose idea of "better" is that? not mine. and people are still dying of AIDS, so there. once you embrace that, continue with the rest of the list.

making the world a better place for you and me:
1. read children Harry Potter. then teach them the word "bullshit".

2. leave the shower running all day. you'll develop some kind of empathy for people living in brazil. also, the world needs cleaner pores.

3. kill poachers. save sharks.

4. ask for things triple-bagged at the grocery store. those landfills they cover with grass and build condos on? they are the only defense we have against rising water.

5. settle mars.

6. learn a little about music and throw stones at bad musicians. like the arcade fire.

7. get a hummer. drive into the sea and kill dolphins.

8. flush the toilet before you sit down, one during, and once after. cleanlines is next to godliness.

9. order big, heavy things from the furthest reaches of the world. the sooner we run out of gas, the sooner people will get cracking on better alternative energy sources. like volcanoes or bees. no one takes windmills seriously. who would? maybe heidi and her beloved grandfather, but that's it.

10. go whaling.

11. do the pandas a favour. they don't want to breed. go ahead and feed them to a more awesome species like tigers who wanna do it like crazy.

12. one word: dinosaurs.

13. destroy native culture. the last thing the world needs is ugly indian art.

14. invite a time machine already, dudes.