No TV and No Beer Make Karen Something Something...:

Rogers has some 'splaining to do. Not that it really matters to me that our cable has been out for the entire day. I know I probably watch too much TV as it stands. And yeah, I got a lot of stuff done today, which could be attributed to fact that the only thing on the tube was fuzzy snow. I'm just glad I got stuff done.

Like taxes. One of the easier returns I've done in a while, although it was never really that difficult to start with. The one thing that was different was the fact that I could do it over the phone for once. Last year I got through half of my return before the recording told me that I'm not eligible to do my taxes over the phone, and would I please submit it using the paper method or the online method. A good twenty minutes of punching 1 for yes or 0 for no. Goddammit.

I had coffee today with Jocelyn, and we were talking about how the majority of her Laurier friends only talk about one thing when they get together these days: weddings. Because the majority of her Laurier friends are in the process of getting married. Which is something that's happening to a lot of people our age. Because it's one of those things that happens near our age. And yet, neither of us could even begin to imagine what it would be like to be at that stage in life. Well, okay, so both of us lack that one crucial element that would allow us to prepare for the mere possibility of it, but that's beside the point. I started thinking about how we're at the beginning again, when a lot of things in life are all shiny and new. Because the first twenty or so years of our lives revolved around the one thing: school. No matter what else happened in our lives, there was school. It was the routine, the thing that we became accustomed to. Now that school is over (for some of us), everything is going to be a first again. First real job, first car, first home, first (and theoretically only) wedding, first child. And the funny thing about this is that little to none of the things that we formally learned in our first twenty years of life have really been designed to prepare us for any of it. I know this isn't a new or revolutionary thought, and I'm sure most if not all of you have already come to the same conclusion. I'm just all scared-excited again, like on my first day of school or my first night in residence at Waterloo. Who knows what will happen next...

"I've found a reason for me to change who I used to be"

Musical Stylings:

I'm pretty bummed that I couldn't catch Aphasia's set at Sneaky Dee's yesterday. After missing their CD release party a while back, I was looking forward to going to one of their gigs. But since their set didn't start until 11:45pm, I had to pass in favour of sleep and general consciousness at work the next day. Stupid job, getting in the way of my having a social life on a weekday...

So rumour has it that Unibrau might be getting back together. Good. Because as I recall, somebody still owes me some rock.

And now, for something slightly different but still musically related. Upon hearing that Madonna was coming to town this summer, I quickly fired off an e-mail to my friend Bashar, who is the biggest Madonna fan I know. Unfortunately, he's sequestered deep in the heart of Chatham at the moment. I got a reply from him shortly, and as I should have guessed, he had already found out about the concert through the e-mail alerts that he gets from some Madonna fansite or another. Life in Chatham has lost most (if not all) of it's appeal, it seems, but Bashar has a renewed lease on life with the arrival of his new pet, a cat. Which he promptly, and in very typical Bashar fashion, named Pussy. I'm sure it's a very adorable cat. Apparently, he still gets slight cringes when he tells his co-workers that he's going home to play with his Pussy.

"Express yourself, don't repress yourself"

You gotta hand it to my parents. Before, they didn't like the fact that I was interested in renting our own condo, the one that's down by the lake. Now that I'm telling them that I'm going to look at a house that's for rent tonight, almost instantly my mother started offering me the condo by the lake. Then my dad started with the guilt trip, the "she'd rather live with two strangers than with us" schtick. And, as per usual, he had a whole slew of negative things to say about the idea. Now I kind of wish I had started with the car proposal first. But...that's life. I know I said that I would never rent again, but I should know better than to say 'never', right? At first, I thought that I could rent from my parents, and that wouldn't really count as renting. So I guess the next best alternative would be to rent from my friend's parents.

Okay, so bad idea #1 was to totally spring the idea on them with no warning. But it's a very fine balance. Tell them early, and they will have time to come up with reason upon reason upon reason why I shouldn't do this, thus prompting me to give up the idea entirely just to get them to shut up. Tell them too late (i.e. after the fact), and then suddenly a HUGE argument could lead to words that you can't take back, or bad feelings for the rest of our lives, or something dramatic like that. My mom has a LONG memory (that's where I get it from). She still complains about that waiter that spilled something on her fifteen years ago, and, as a result, we have never returned to that establishment (even though it has changed ownership three times and that waiter has hopefully moved on to greener pastures). So...oh...there's the phone. Time to go.

"Ain't nobody gonna hold me down, oh no, I got to keep on movin'"

Forever Young:

Today was my former classmate and current co-worker Shanthini's birthday. I basically discovered this through the magic of eavesdropping in a cubicle environment (which, as everyone knows, is pretty damned easy). Marianli (one of our supervisors) and Shanthini were having the age conversation which led to the topic of being carded. Marianli was once carded at a club or something and basically felt insulted that the bouncer thought she was under 19 (I believe she was around 30 at the time). Keep in mind that she's one of the little Filipino ladies I told you about earlier. Dhimo (another one of Shanthini's friends who got into the company through her) mentioned that she always felt great if she still gets carded somewhere.

So we (myself, Shanthini, Dhimo, Thanujah, Wumi, Joanna, and Tina) went out for lunch at East Side's to celebrate the occasion. While we were eating, we noticed that there was a young-looking kid who was serving a table on the other side of the restaurant. By looks, a person would guess that the kid was around ten to twelve years old. First of all, aren't there labour laws against this kind of thing? Sure, it's March Break right now, but holy crap, it was kind of weird, like eating in a sweat shop. We all figured that he was a family member of one of the employees or something, and maybe they couldn't find anyone to watch him this week. But, again through the magic of eavesdropping, we learned that no, this wasn't a situation where Child Services should be called. This young man was actually nineteen years old, and had cystic fibrosis which stunted his growth. This guy is probably going to be carded for the rest of his life.

"Don't waste your time on me you're already a voice inside my head"

Happy Birthday Big Five:

Okay, so this is technically untrue. I have no idea when my beloved Fifth Avenue was "born", but today was the day that the odometer slowly creeped past 99999 and started on it's third time around the dial. 200 thousand kilometers is a lot, isn't it? Sigh...I can't believe we're going to get rid of her soon...

Every once in a while I like to sit back and realize that I'm a grown-up. Well, at least marvel at the grown-up things that I do. Like tonight. I had dinner with my good friend Howie (I find that's the phrase I use whenever I mention him now..."my good friend Howie") at a place in the Bloor West Village that serves "West Coast" cuisine, which was extremely appropriate for the occasion. We ordered martinis, and had a conversation while live jazz was playing in the background. Then we phoned a number of friends and organized a brunch on Saturday. I'm not sure how much more grown-up we could be.

"Summertime and the livin' is easy"

So, my good friend Howie is jetting off on Saturday. Bon voyage...

I had a realization this week. In the time that it used to take for me to drive from my house to Waterloo, that is now the same amount of time it takes for me to drive to work each day. This realization made me think of Mike. Back in the days of Woodbridge Foam, Mike opted to stay at his place in Waterloo (as opposed to subletting it out in the summer, which, as I've experienced, is a complete pain in the ass) and make the commute every day to Woodbridge. It would take him a little over an hour or so. I used to think, "Poor Mike..." Poor Mike indeed. At least he was able to carpool with Andrew, the part-time grad student, full-time foam jockey.

Speaking of work, I now have a ton of it. You know you've made it when there isn't a square inch of desk space left. I'm handling two complaints right now that are frankly not the easiest things in the world and are actually making me a little antsy. First, there's the complaint about a drug that smells like rotten eggs (it's not supposed to smell like rotten eggs). There are at least a dozen complaints about this product that cover maybe eight or ten different batches. So, as you may well guess, my job now is to pull out a million retain samples and check to see if they smell like rotten eggs. My nose is not speaking to me anymore, plus I'm not sure how healthy it is for me to be inhaling this stuff. Second, there's the complaint about another drug that has a coating problem, namely that the coating is peeling off. Right now, it has me stumped because it's unusual that nobody, not in manufacturing or even in packaging, noticed that the coating was peeling off all of these pills, but that's not all. I looked up what this drug is used for (as I do with most of the drugs I deal with now). It is an antipsychotic drug. Okay, I've seen "Girl, Interrupted" a few times, and I know that in most mental institutions, they do use drugs to treat patients, but I would have thought that, by now, they would come up with a better category name for it. Or maybe it's better to keep it simple.

"One, two, three, take my hand and come with me"

Lesson for yesterday: So yeah, the TTC does run 24 hours on some routes, including buses that run along the subway lines after they close...

So work is going well. Still complaining about the drive, but there are some things that you just learn along the way. Like the fact that every day, I drive past that company that used to offer the rocket scientist position for co-op (I kept saying to myself, "why does the town of Gormley sound so familiar?). And it really is in the middle of nowhere, which makes good sense when you're working with rockets...

It's been three weeks, and already I'm kind of swamped with stuff to do at work. Which I'm not complaining about, I like to keep busy. I guess I didn't expect it to pick up so soon. Of course, the obligatory training is coming up, like GMP and WHMIS and Inspection Prep. (a.k.a. "What to do when the FDA guy comes around"). Always a good time at those.

But it's not all toil and stress. The ladies I work with are hilarious. They make fun of each other incessantly. I guess I'm fitting in nicely, since they're starting to include me in the taunting. But there's really nothing like watching a couple of Filipino ladies dancing around the office doing their best rendition of "She Bangs" a la William Hung.

"Cause she looks like a flower but she stings like a bee"