The forum is open

Prompted by several complaints, I've decided to tinker with the settings, and you can now comment even if you're hunted by the C.I.A. and are desperately trying to keep your identity secret. I better get a fucking deluge of adulation though.

Christmas '08

We managed to get Christmas food shopping done in under an hour. Could be because mom got sick and I went to the supermarket with dad alone - less time spent on arguing, as it's kinda hard to argue when you don't have much to say to each other. I think we both took some pleasure in our efficiency though.

I saw a packet of dried beets, which gave me pause. I also learned that my mind is immune to the concept of buying prunes. It just shut down and I grabbed whatever caught my eye with nary a conscious thought. And so, on the first attempt I came back to my preplexed father with some dried apples, then I presented him with a jar of French toffee, and finally I came back empty-handed after performing a totally cartoonish halt-and-head-swivel after some random guy my autopilot glimpsed peripherally and decided he warranted further inspection. It was so obviously earnest I could have safely made an "oh I thought you were someone else" face, or performed some other evasive manouver. Except I was - as I've already mentioned - in a prune-induced coma, so I just stared blankly for a moment and went on my way.

I managed to get my mother the perfume she wanted, but the book I had planned on giving my father was nowhere to be found. Finally, before embarking on another hunting mission, I asked him if there was something in particular he wanted to get this Christmas, in case I failed, to which my family replied that they'll just package something from my dad's bookshelf in festive wrapping paper for the sake of appearances (i.e. - the uncle), and I can get the book after the shopping frenzy subsides. I think it's a good estimate of how vibrant the holiday spirit is in our household.

But maybe that's the secret to a calm and pleasant Christmas, cause I definitely enjoyed ours this year. I ate my weight in smoked salmon, watched a lot of Undeclared (which is HILARIOUS), and played entirely too much WoW. I also neglected to get any work done, and find that fact simply awesome.

Apart from that, I feel a bit like the last stand of a drainpipe clog - almost completely flushed, but still hanging on by a tampon thread. Monika came back home for the holidays and I'd hoped to be unclogged, one way or the other, by the time we got to talk, but I guess it was not meant to be. A fan of international postal service I am not.

It's kind of funny that I had about 2 weeks' worth of candidness in me, after switching to this blog, and then instantly reverted to unwieldly obfuscation. I guess it's not the venue, but the audience that counts.

My name's not Anne, and I got no plan, but you still need to listen to this:

Goat cheese +7

[PSA: Sometimes I get the nucleus of, say, a Nine Princes in Amber analogy stuck in my head that just won't go away until I at least try to pin it down "on paper". In the process, I tend to forego restraint and accuracy in favor of cohesion and impact. In other words: I'm not suicidal, merely pretentious. Thank you for your attention.]

The best way to get out of a rut is to do something you don't do every day. (That will be five bucks.) I found that the easiest way to do that is to meet up with someone you rarely get to see. Exotica on a budget. I immediately tapped Natalia, whom I'd been dying to see anyway. It turned out they were having some friends over, and so, an hour later, there I was sipping wine and stuffing my face with cheese. And having my hairdo compared to Zac Efron's, which I took in stride as something you don't hear every day, ergo: desirable in my current mindframe. However revolting the thought.

The friends turned out to be Hadi, whom I'd already met on several occasions and know to be a hoot and a fellow TV series whore, Jennifer Garner, whom I'd seen in a couple of movies, and her quiet boyfriend (surprisingly enough: not Ben Affleck). Seriously though, the girl 's resemblance to the actress, at least from the profile, verged on freakish. The conversation started out with the behind-the-scenes drama in Polish media (ohhh the intrigue!), and got progressively more interesting and... well, abstract. Buying palaces near Opole, attending a Canadian gay wedding during the Gay Olympics in Toronto, getting hit on by gap-toothed editors... Somehow it kept returning to the topic of living abroad - with no effort on my behalf, if I might add. Hadi said that as of last year you don't need a visa to go to Canada for a period under 3 months. And according to Natalia, Berlin is dirt-cheap compared to Warsaw - you can rent a 70m2 apartment in fucking Kreuzberg for around 300 Euros a month. That's what you pay for a single-bedroom shithole in... Wlochy, or something. Also, the British pound is supposedly worth three doornails and a half-hearted fart right now. I'll let it all simmer some more and then see what pops out at me.

All in all, a very nice, relaxing evening. And I managed to sneak in a song Bohdan sent me a while back. This is one of those you're kind of forced to like, or at least pretend to, because it's so undeniably cool, trying to refute it makes you decidedly less than:

Gnyah

This is the last time I try to write about past events based on notes I made at the time. It's nightmarishly tedious, and reads horribly. Also: sticking to just English? Not as easy as it seemed.

I have to be strong though. For James Franco.

Quick reboot

I don't know how it speaks to my character that my first transitional creation got aborted halfway down the birth canal, but whatcha gonna do. The first name I came up with - Neon Express - was basically just a nice, generic prefix coupled with an all-purpose suffix. Fluff and vowelage, signifying nothing. But then I found this purdy sign, fell in love with it, plastered it on front and center, built the entire color scheme around it... and it's really kind of heavy-duty. This shit be grim. So the name got adjusted accordingly.

And that's precisely how you recognize solid, thought-provoking content - it's always posted under headers inspired by random google image searches. A little bit of insider info there for you.

Woe is a three-letter word

So, I'm not exactly sure how this thing is going to work. I never understood the idea of having multiple blogs. It seems like so much fuss, and a bit schizophrenic to boot. However, I do need to get legally adopted by some well-off Vancouver family at some point (duh!), and chances of them deciphering what a delight I'd be around the condo from my Polish scribblings are pretty slim. And on the flipside, I've always felt kind of douchey and pretentious posting in English on the old blog. So here we are.

Except, as I've already stated above, I'm not sure where "here" is yet.