How Did You Do It?
“Well,” she said, “Smoke and mirrors…”
Anything for love, anything for love.
It’s been occurring to me lately that I’m really losing touch with the habit of writing journal entries about everyday life. I was talking to Kim about it just a week or so ago, about how it can kind of seem boring and inconsequential at the time, but it’s fun to read years later. I like going to my really old journal archives and hearing my fifteen-year-old self chime, ‘I got new shoes today!’ Back then I used to note every detail but now it’s evolved more to ‘these days in general I have been thinking about…’ which is good too. But I want to do both again.
When I get behind in journal entries, I always feel like I want to catch up, so… August has been quite busy! André’s here from Germany of course so I’ve been hanging out with him a fair bit, watching movies and my family’s been showing him around. So far we’ve gone to Elbow Falls and the Badlands and there’s a trip to Banff on the near horizon too. With Kristen and Rob we’ve gone to the Zoo and Shakespeare in the Park and played Wii Sports.
Also the other awesome thing we did with Kristen and Rob is to to Alex’s job with her one night. She’s working with a PhD student who’s studying migratory patterns (and other things) of bats in Calgary. So we went out to Shannon Terrace at 10:30 pm and Alex picked us up in her massive U of C truck and we got to drive along all the bike paths because the park is locked up at night so no one else is there. They have nets set up in strategic locations to catch the bats and when they do, they record their age and wing length and various other data, and fit them with a tag. So I got to pet a bat! It was very fuzzy and I thought it was cute. Awesome! The whole thing was interesting, Alex’s boss was talking to us about bats for a while, which was really cool! But last week when I got my hair cut and my hairdresser asked me if I’d done some interesting things this summer, I tried to explain why seeing real live bats was so great, and she just didn’t understand. I kind of felt like a dork, but it was funny..!
Frisbee’s been going well too, even though I had to sit out last time because my cough was in full swing (oh yeah, I’m sick and I stayed home from work twice this month, which maybe looked kind of bad but I was so dizzy those days, both Mondays, that I could hardly even sit up. Blah…). Last Thursday I didn’t go either, I stayed home and played Settlers with André and Mike and dad. Mike won hands down, but I made a risky move at the beginning that never quite paid off. Yesterday after church, Kim and Eric came over to play Cranium and it was sweet, we also watched old dance tapes (André wanted to, now I doubt he’ll want to again! Ha!) and played Taboo. It was pretty awesome and fun, we should do it more often I think.
I’ve been reading a little this summer, but nothing heavy. I blazed through the last Harry Potter of course, and since then I re-read The Giver, one of my favourite books even though I first read it with my class in grade six. I think I’m going to do a painting based on this book soon. It is so well-written in that it’s short but describes a lot. In any case, then I re-read Life of Pi, also an amazing book, because it had been a while and I like re-reading books. Then, ‘The Horizontal Instrument’ (Christopher Wilkins) per my dad’s suggestion. Wow, what a great yet sad book. I wish so much that I had read this in grade twelve because it would have fit in perfectly, perfectly with the topic for our English diploma, “Discuss the significant impact of memories of the past.” It just makes me ache when I think about how much better a commentary I could have done. As it were, I used The Handmaid’s Tale, a stretch at best. That stupid diploma. I thought I had all my bases covered. All my nights beforehand were spent re-reading everything from the term. The Handmaid’s Tale for freedom and coercion, Night for overcoming adversity, Prufrock for not overcoming adversity, Araby and Dover Beach for life’s vanity… augh! Memories!? I felt the same way when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out. “Where were you two months ago?!”
Anyways, right now I’m reading The DaVinci Code for the first time even though I saw the movie and thought it was ‘just okay’. The book is always better of course, everyone always says that without fail about movies based on books. In my opinion, that tends to be true except in the case of Lord of the Rings because the writing was so boring to me that I couldn’t even claw through the first two-hundred pages of the first book. Plus, Aragorn in the books was on the trail to Mordor singing songs. He’s hard-core, he can’t be singing jolly traveling tunes. “Hay guys, pass the trail mix!” Nah, they did him much better in the movies.
So… things that are on the radar as things to come up in the near future for me are… I need to practice driving a lot more so I can own Driver’s Ed and get my license finally. And soon we’re going to go and visit Jared and Angie and Nathan. Can’t wait! I have the so coolest idea for a present for him, possibly for his first birthday because I’m a noob and it might take a while! Actually I’m going to have to talk with Kim for some suggestions… hmmm.
Well that’s about all. I got new shoes today!
