Not Quite the News

Or is it?

This morning my mom read an article in the trusty Edmonton Sun about women who are getting surgery on their "genitals." Who says genitals? Doctors, sex ed teachers, and my mother.

"They're getting their labia...Libya? Labia? Well whatever, they're getting that cut right off! The government's probably paying for it too."

No mom, no they're not, that's ridiculous, stop talking about this... HOWEVER, being the investigative journalist that I am, I frickin checked. Well what the fuck do you know? Women are getting their labia (minora) cut off in the aptly named procedure called The Barbie.

A quote in the article by Dr. Red Alinsod: "Women did not want to live with unflattering, sagging, and large labias, nor did they want to live with gaping open vaginas..."

Great use of descriptors doc. Really fantastic visual imagery. Tell me Red, how are your old balls looking this morning?

(Tight, taut, smooth and shiny.)

How many days until vacation?

34. And counting. Until then I'm google-image dreaming. My vacation pre-req is that it must look like a middle aged office worker's computer wallpaper.

Hainan Island

Wuzhizhou Island

Oh, and we're also going to Beijing....but that's less computer wallpapery, more interesting historically.

I come from fine stock

For some reason, I'm now able to see my aforementioned cousin 's facebook profile, and thank god too or I would have missed this.

Is it the grammatical atrocities? Is it his friend who coincidentally has court on the very same day? Is it his granny wishing him luck? Also in bizarre grammatical form? Is it his son in his profile pic? Does it matter? No. It's hilarious and I'm a bad person.

This looks familiar

30 degrees and thundershowers for the foreseeable future with a 70% chance I'll freak the fuck out if I don't get a fan or air con or a god damn ice bucket to shove my head in.

My classroom is a great place for a hands-on religious studies class because if this is what hell feels like then Hail Mary, full of ice, chilly be thy name. Thy aircon come, thy cool will come, like ice cream and I'll be in heaven.

(I had to recite the Lord's Prayer in public school in Canada, which seems so crazytown, but, there it is.)

Ve can go vegan!

Vegans can be pretentious (no offence, but really, check yo self) and this meal is vegan but I assure you I am as salty as the earth I come from. And my father's a farmer, so I totally know about the salt level of soil.

I'm sure millet is a wonderful thing; several holistic naturopathic well being practitioners on the internet say as much. Fact: millet is high in vitamins E, C and BS. However, if you've eaten plain white rice every day of your life but really only the past year and four months even though it seems much longer...millet is the fucking bomb.

Millet cooks just like rice, but if you toast it in a dry pan it's better and also you can use chicken stock for flavour. Unless you're vegan, in which case just use tears collected from fois gras geese. Or, if you add just a titch more water and some cinnamon you can enjoy millet as a delicious breakfast cereal.

My fancy new computer doesn't have an sd card reader (tf mac?) but I put together a photo booth montage of how to make a millet based dinner.

Start with a base layer of cooked milet. It looks like something between chunky vomit and wet cement here, but not in real lyfe:

Add your veg. I roasted some peppers, eggplant, onion and garlic, but you could do anything. I also had some dried portobellas that I rehydrated and fried (the stems on mine never fully rehydrate, is that weird?).

Here I've added some raw bok choy leaves I picked from my window garden, as well as parsley, sunflower seeds and a mustard vinagrette. I never considered raw bok choy, but I didn't want to cook them because they looked so pretty and I've been waiting months to eat them. They were amazing! I hate to use 'buttery' to describe anything without butter, but they were! Buttery bok choy! Who knew! !

Then mix it up real good.

Eat dat shit!

Weirdo

For a couple weeks now this grade 6 girl has been pointing at my head and then making a gesture as though her hair was coming out of her head. I thought she was insinuating that my hair was thin, or she thought I was balding or something, which is not unlikely because she is a child sized jerk.

Today I was wrong though; she wasn't being a jerk, she was just being a plain old weirdo. She did the hair falling out gesture again, but this time on my head, and I understood that she was requesting a piece of my hair. Strange, but I have the mystical yellow hair so I thought maybe she just wanted to see it up close so I ran a hand through my hair and found an already detached strand. As I showed her, she grabbed it from my fingers and, after inspecting it, tucked it safely away in her pencil case.

I hope she's cloning me and not framing me for murder.

That's happening.

Checked the weather forecast for the week....Yeah, 32 and red lightning bolts tomorrow. Red! So, obviously looking forward to that.

Languages are Offensive

When learning a new language I like to use mnemonics to help memorize new vocabulary words. For example:

onion: 양파 This word vaguely sounds like 'young pa' (actually more like 'yang') so I picture a teenage onion with a baby that he can't take care of.

blue: 파란 Following on the father theme, 'pa ran' away from his baby who was turning blue. Onions are terrible parents.

eraser: 지우개 This is pronounced 'ji-oo-gey' so I think "Gee, you're gay for using an eraser."

orange: 주황색 The first part of this word sounds like 'joo hwang' so I think "Orange as a Jew's wang."

So yeah, my Korean's coming along fine, thanks.

Top Tall

Yesterday at a visit to the back doctor I found out that I have an extra bone in my spine. The doctor says most people have only 5 lumbar vertebrae but I have 6 and that's why I'm tall. I thought maybe he was intuitively aware of my desire to be both tall and unique and was just flattering me, but the internet says only 10% of people have 6 lumbar vertebrae. I guess what I'm saying is that medically speaking, I'm awesome.

Of course the disks around my special 6th vertebrae are inflamed and pressing on a nerve, but maybe that makes them more awesome? They really wanted me to know about them and the good work they do at getting me well up and over the national height average of most countries (and exactly on par with the Dinaric Alps, which in full disclosure I've never even heard of) so they started making a little fuss to call attention to themselves. Well played, special 6th. Much respect. But after this shout out please stop being inflamed because it's kind of a bitch.

Also: the doctor said as part of my therapy I can't do sit ups. Can't do situps. Are you freaking kidding me? Trust me, I've experimented with this idea in the past and it turns out I have the body shape of a walrus, so I'm just going to keep doing situps untill the sea cows come home mmmkay.