Rapa Nui

Mamá & Axel with the moais... not, not a giant bottle of pisco, kids.

I learnt that each of the big heads was meant to look like the dead person it represented. Axel also told me he was able to ride his bike for 4 hours (he enjoys marathonic trips) without seeing a single human on Easter Island.

MyohMy

"China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Thursday. (From an Associated Press wire)

I have news for Ms. Yu: it’s already complicated.

Have you heard what’s happening in Myanmar? I hear it every morning on the radio news, like a slow, persistent, deathly drumbeat. I bet these monks are in it for the long haul. If you’re a Buddhist monk, I would guess you’re not too concerned about whether it’s you getting beaten to death or the next guy, and that’s how you win a battle, I think. Individualization of soldiers annoys me, because I feel it undermines the concept of a united front, where each man is everyman. Samurai, Spartan, whatnot. Didn’t they do it this way? I don’t know much, but I hope these monks and their compatriots win. From what I gather, they have nothing to lose.

[the photo is of the Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai, 52, who died after being shot while trying to photograph the events]

We all need to feel secure, we're so middle class

Tautology

From the book Armed Gunmen, True Facts and Other Ridiculous Nonsense (comments by Mental Floss.com)

• “False pretense”
If pretense is “the act of alleging falsely,” as Dictionary.com asserts, then wouldn’t a false pretense be … true?

• “Advance warning”
A warning delivered after the fact is known, I believe, as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

• “Convicted felon”
If we’re guilty until proven innocent, there shouldn’t be too many convictionless felons running around.

• “Surviving widow”
Kallan defines it thusly: “The last woman standing in an all-widow game of Russian roulette.”

• “Fall down”
Gravity tends to make this modifier unnecessary.

• “All throughout”
More pervasive than occasionally throughout.

• “Close proximity”
As opposed to a distant proximity?

• “Sum total”
This really gets the point across … and then sum.

• “Shared dialogue”
When was the last time you heard a shared monologue?

• “Mass exodus”
When everyone leaves church at the same time? And speaking of church …

• “Holy Bible”
I’m so tired of these unholy Bibles.

I need a housewife

What I am looking for is someone to:

*clean my apartment
*make small home repairs (see post re: my broken curtain)
*run errands

More about me:

*I'm out of the house a lot, don't have time to sit around waiting for a load of laundry to get done in the building's basement before anyone steals my basket (again)
*I like to eat healthy, simple things but can barely get around to purchasing them at the supermarket, much less preparing them into lunches
*Life is chaos, things break, my list of items in need of repair or change is growing and I'm not doing anything about it. Can you help?

Ideal housewives are:

*Equally opportunity employer
*Harassment free environment
*Fair pay, fair labour conditions
*Must enjoy taking care of *moi* and *mes needs* and thrive on praise

What am I doing here?

*

Spandex, lamé, headbands, short shorts, athletic socks, grinding up the dancefloor, crowd-surfing to DJs who plays squeaky sounds, DJs who mash up samples and call it groundbreaking, some drug I can’t even tell you’re on, teenagers, kids who look like teenagers… what am I doing here?

Maybe it’s because I’ve been to “too many” dance shows lately. Maybe the planets aligned differently this summer and I’m suddenly no longer the same person I used to be. I like to dance. I like to dance a lot. My preferred style of dancing is called “jumping up and down and shaking” (jumping down is an interesting concept but we can talk about that another day) and I have been doing it freely and wildly since, oh, 1993. Before that, I danced but it was comme il faut. I was all awkward circle dancing at the Loyola gym, or waiting for some boy who turned out to be gay to make out with me to Roxette. I looked around at how the other girls danced and I just couldn’t do it like them. Thank God for Britpop. Thank God for Damon Albarn releasing the hoppy dance craze. Thank God for wicked fast drum beats and pounding electronica. Thank God for Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and every other nerd-jerky kind of music that finally was in sync with what I’d had in my body the whole time. No more of this sinewy, cool chic dancing. Dance, dance, dance to the radio.

And then, I don’t know. People started saying the kids at the places I like to dance at are too young. I said I ignore them. And then, suddenly, at the MSTRKRFT show at the SAT on September 1, I suddenly saw them. I had seen them before and suddenly I *saw* them: the dayglo tube dresses, everything cheesy about the 80s, tap dancing, gyrating, we-just-got-out-of-8th-grade-gym-class kids. So what am *I* still doing here? I swear that night I could feel the gap between me and the rest of the crowd stretching wider right before my eyes. I can barely listen to these people chatter, much less commune with them on a sweaty dancefloor. I am on the verge of not understanding a thing about them anymore. I am old. I am a hasbeen. And I don’t even care what they think.

When I was 17 I used to go dancing at this club with a particular boy and his friends, and I remember how we used to be shocked if anyone as old as 25 came in. What were they doing there, it was so weird!

Ultimately, I don’t think age has everything to do with it. I had friends who were never into the debauchery of dance, drugs and delirium, no matter how young they were. And I know there are people who will never want to leave that environment, no matter how old they get. It’s not them; it’s me. Scratched record, something skipped. I opened my eyes and I saw that I was in a foreign country that used to be mine. I decided I wanted to leave. But not before Justice on October 19 (!)
* if you can tell me who this is, you are a young shooting star.

inneresting fax

* I haven't posted anything here since August.

* Most people visit my blog on Wednesdays, and the most popular keyword used to find it is... halloween (??) followed by nancy kerrigan, which is really the same thing since what they find on my old site when they google those words is a picture of me and Button dressed up as tonya harding and nancy kerrigan one halloween. I am probably not helping to reduce these hits by writing about them now...

* The top 3 blogs sending visitors my way are Bubi's, It's All Grey to Me, and Amy's. Thanks, ladies!

* I write more when I am living less, I suppose. Now I can only think of things like this to say: my curtains broke; I like the dog park on Dr. Penfield for lunch; my kitchen stinks due to leaving a rotting blob of couscous and chickpeas out and I can't wait for trash day; my hibiscus is multi-blooming and I love it; I have a new used tv; I got notification that my new laptop has arrived in the mail; I think the fighting couple was relocated to the first floor of the building but it's only a hunch. I know everyone always wants to know what's up with them...

How I spent my summer(s)

Two summers ago I dated three guys in quick succession. I knew they were all wrong for me. A) great on paper B) a great idealization and C) a great conversation that ended the very second we became a couple, as correctly predicted by him.

Last summer, two of the characters from the year before played starring roles in the Polanski directed version of my life. Murky waters. The third had only a cameo role. Thank God.

This summer, I have learnt about karma, retribution, deceit, and -ultimately- how your adversaries can become your allies by taking the dead weight you've been carrying around off your hands. At first, it's unpleasant but when you realize the major favour being done for you, it's hoorah!

Sarah came over on the day my fridge horoscope (a magnetic calendar with a new message for each day) said the following:

To get what you want, it helps greatly to know exactly what that is. What you want is defined by your real desire, not what you think you'll probably get.

Apt words for our activity that night -besides drinking mojitos-, creating a list of my so-called dealbreakers. I ended up with six, which Sarah thinks is too many, but I had to fight her on it. Dealbreakers are things you will not accept in an FLP (as Sarah calls them), and therefore we converted my list into a contract, which begins thus:

I, Isabel Brinck, hereby solemnly swear that I will not pursue a relationship with anyone who:


and then the points we came up with follow. I could have copied the list here, but it's kind of too personal, I think. Plus, you don't really need to know unless you are a) one of my assigned veto-empowered friends who may axe any undesirable candidates or b) a candidate.

Most of my list is made up of the-worst-of-the-worst of what I've already experienced. If I read it that way, it's pretty pathetic. But going back to the adversary-cum-ally, if I realize that I have been thankfully released from all of these things, than hallelujah, I *love* this list!