a canadian in california

it's true... i am a canadian through and through. things i miss are little, but meaningful...

i miss being able to buy tropicana juice in the charming faux milk carton that it comes in at home. here, it comes in a big ole jug. no charm what-so-ever.

i miss good cheddar. the brand-name stuff here is practically worse than the no-name stuff you can buy at price chopper.

i miss celsius temperatures. i never know what the bleeding temperature is here. 75F. what the fuck is 75F? argh. i am left with no other option than asking my parents to convert the temperature into something that makes sense to me. fyi, 75F is about 24C. not too freakin' bad... :)

i miss cp24. when i visit alberta during the holidays, it is somehow comforting to be able to turn on the 24-hour toronto news network and know that you can be up to date on all the shootings and random moronic goings-on that make toronto my quirky little home. i feel oddly out of touch with toronto right now.

i miss seeing bottles with mL measurements instead of a bizarre mixture of fluid oz and pints. (1 pint & 0.9 fluid oz = 0.5 litre). why the american's don't just join the rest of the world and go metric... i do not know. i actually have some theories, but i don't want to be kicked out of california before i come home on thursday...

i miss canadian accents! i can only guess it's a canadian accent because absolutely no one down here doesn't sound like they have a rampant american drawl. no one.

i miss the haughty cold manner of the folk at home. i miss being able to just scowl your way through the day without anyone acknowledging you. here everyone is just so damned friendly. don't they know that there's good scowling to be had?

there are good things here too....

you can buy starbucks beans in the grocery store.

they have salt and pepper flavoured chips (i thought you could only get those in the UK).

they have gorgeous palm trees, mountains, blue skies and wonderful swimming pools.

i am the youngest person in just about every place i go.

the l.a. times is a really great newspaper. the paper actually has journalisic articles and opinions - it really puts the toronto papers to shame.

the neighbours are so nice... when i mentioned i liked making fresh lemonade out of the lemons on the lemon trees, they began leaving bags of lemons on the patio table for me.

with that sort of treatment, who needs to scowl all of the time?

[music | david usher, "going home"]

night divides the day

i really shouldn't get as excited as i did over breakfast at international house of pancakes.(signed pics of ice cube on the wall!!) sadly, it insists on being called "ihop" now. *sigh* for the uninitiated, it's a giant american chain of restaurants and it has yummy yummy pancakes and omelets. mmmm.... so far, it's been the best food i've had when i've been out to "dine" in palm springs. there has just got to be better food in america than the dry and abused and salty eggplant parmesana i had at tony's pasta mia (signed pics of sinatra on the wall!!), or the slimy veggie burger i had at coco's. (no signed pics on the wall, what's wrong with them, don't they understand where they are located??)

a few days ago my dad and i piled in the rental suv and drove our asses off to get to a place called the salton sea. the website, if you go to it, is far more impressive than the damned sea is itself. it took several hours of driving though the desert to come to a smelly stagnant body of water with an insane salt content (25% more salty than ocean water). apparently there are many many birds that come to this lake. i saw a bunch of gulls. what else can i tell you... uhm... the water is red.... seriously, it's red - i did not alter this picture.

the other thing i can tell you about the salton sea is that there were people camping there. why there? i do not know... it smelled, was hot and there was nothing much to see. and someone camping there once apparently does not care for president bush... this is a picture that i took in the loo. heehee. just so you know, i don't make it a habbit to pull out the old digital in the washrooms of the world.


the next day was spent in a more picturesque location.... the living desert in palm desert. it has a mini-zoo with giraffe's, cougars, zebra's and scary wild african dogs. there was something just so primal about them. i felt an uncomfortable thrill deep in my core when i looked at them. everything about them screamed predator. they moved very quickly and seemed to have an economy of motion that would lend itself well to a killing attack. *shiver* then last night as i was falling asleep i heard wild coyotes howling - which of course made me a little afraid of the african wild dogs! i just held my jim morrison book tighter!

i have also talked my dad into making the 5 hour drive up to death valley. i have no idea what we will see there, but ever since i was a little girl, i loved the name death valley. probably because it had the word death in it and i was always a touch morbid - still am. monday morning i'll be getting up at 5:00am and will be hauling my cookies several hours north. the thing i like about it the most is that my dad hasn't been there yet either. and when we go places he's been before he tends to want to re-create the last time he went (on the way to the salton sea, we stopped in a little dust-trap of a town called brawley, only because last time he went to the salton sea, he stopped in brawley. you get the picture.)

speaking of getting the picture - here's the latest installment of my photo-travel-log.

the very scary african wild dog. it was staring over at the gate. like it was trying to reason a way out.

the exhibit had 3 giraffe's and apparently we were lucky that these ones were so close to us. seems they like to hide behind some of the hills in their enclosure.

a huge part of the living desert was the cactus gardens... there were literally 100's of different types of cacti.

a simulated "oasis" of giant california fan palms. these trees had trunks about 3 feet wide and grew quite tall. the stuff you see that looks very much like shaggy mammoth fur is actually old palm fronds - which provides a lot of shade for those seeking refuge from the hot desert sun.

final picture tonight is of a female mountain cougar. between she and me was a glass barrier. she was really quite beautiful - i had no idea cougars' eyes bugged out quite so much.

[music | the doors, "love me two times"]

the west is the best

so here i sit in palm springs. on an unsecured, un-password-protected, unknown wireless connection. heehee. guess i won't be doing any banking from this connection, will i?

after yesterday's panic for leaving for the airport on time, it was nice to be able to just sit on a couple of planes and think of nothing for several hours. nothing but the amazing and fascinating stephen davis biography of jim morrison that i've been reading. holy, unholy fascination. since beginning the book a few days ago, i have begun to become a doors fan. yes, me. a fan of the doors. after spending most of my life trying to avoid their music, i'm now downloading tracks from itunes at a frightening clip.

what a fucked up individual (jim, not me). he is reminding me a lot of kurt cobain. growing up when i did, i was much more aware of cobain's music and his demon genius. i also have a copy of his published journals (sorry, kurt, i know how much you would of hated that) and i have to say that the absolute messed-up havoc that pushed cobain seems to have also pushed morrison. it's hard to know which one was pushed harder or further.

i will say that it does seem that if people like kurt and jim didn't actually end up creating enduring music and art that they'd some of the biggest losers ever. then again - maybe their torment and addictions and bad behaviour were necessary to birth their creations.

anyway - after the journey across north america, i was happy to end up in joshua tree national park today. it's pretty big, pretty hot and literally full of joshua trees. the best part of the day was the search for "skull rock". i found a trail with a big-ass arrow on it pointing in a direction. we began to walk down the trail, assuming that after 10 minutes or so, we'd come to the rock shaped like a skull. well, we walked and walked and then walked some more. it was some very beautiful desert terrain to be walking through, but there was still no damned skull rock. we actually got to a bit of a dead end and decided to turn around and go back the way we came. thinking we'd come across this goddamn rock on the way back. nope. we just missed it... or so we thought. instead, right beside the highway there was skull rock. literally 10 steps in from the road. plainly visible. actually, it was just to the left of the big-assed arrow i mentioned above. heehee. i think my dad was a little regretful of the long walk under the very hot sun. oh well... i loved it!

taken as the plane was coming in to palm springs. come to think of it - this could very well be joshua tree national park!

part of the formation imaginatively called "jumbo rocks"

the joshua tree forest - you literally could look to your left and see these strange and twisted trees for miles and miles and miles.

a classic image of a classic joshua tree. it's a lot larger than you think it might be.

doesn't this look like the hand of a giant who is trying to climb to the top of this hill? it wasn't, just in case you were wondering...

the infamous (and obvious) skull rock.

[music | the doors, "the end"]

can i tell you two things?

this is short but sweet as i'm tired as all-fuck.

1 - i got a full-time job. yey me. don't ask me what the job is... i really have no idea at the moment.

2 - i am going to palm springs on tuesday, jan 24 and not coming back to toronto until feb 2nd. i am SO going to the joshua tree national park. and i will come home with a picture of me by a joshua tree... just as it's decreed that every good u2 fan should do.

who knew that by the end of this week that not only would i score a great apartment - but that i would also score a job that will help me to actually PAY for said apartment. i didn't know. that's for certain.

k - going to sleep now.

yey me.

page 118

i am reading alex garland's most recent work. the coma. it made me cry on the subway on my way home this afternoon. or maybe it was because the job that i was considered the "best candidate" for went to another person out of work place loyalty.

when will i not be "the outsider"? i thought all that gets sorted out after you leave highschool. guess not.

what's the passage that had me fighting back sobs?

"Long grass and black windows. A bit of rope hanging from a tree that once held the swing, whose wooden board had rotted away. A front path, where moss grew over broken concrete and dandelions pushed through the cracks."

i think i need to read cheerier material. and i probably need to be listening to cheerier music than depeche mode's mid-80's singles. it is a question of trust, indeed.

[music | depeche mode, "strangelove"]

living

still around... just really don't have anything new to add to this space. work situation is still unresolved, however it's getting stupider by the moment. i'm told i'm the best candidate but that they're offering the position to a person who's been at the company for eons to show loyalty. yey. i think 99.99% of companies out there don't have any sort of demonstrable loyalty to their slaves, er employees. i somehow have managed to find the 00.01% of companies that actually seems to have some sort of bizarre loyalty to their long-time suffering staff.

that's all fine and well - but still leaves me without. there is still a chance that the person won't accept the job. she's thinking about it. she's also been offered a carrot for later this summer and an even bigger carrot this autumn - but only if she stays in here current role.

i know. it's fucked.

and i still am ready to book that flight to palm springs. it will cost my parents more to shell out to see me - but they are telling me that they still want me to come if i don't get the job. i fear that they should be preparing for a sad little muffin appearing at their poolside.

the bit of good news is that today a landlord accepted me and my roomie's application. as of march 15th i have a nice place to move into. i just hope that i can pay for it. *gulp*

we're going to see it again on saturday (and to hand over some cheques) and i should have better pictures then. until saturday, here's a sneak preview of my new place.

it's in the 2nd & 3rd floor of this house. much better than a mainfloor.

the view of the dining room from the kitchen. the room in the distance is the living room

this is the lovely living room. or, rather, it's half of it. the room is very very large. yey.

ok. that's it. i'll try to muster more cheer next time. i'm hoping it won't need to be false cheer & that i will be able to write here about my wonderful new job.

[music | the arcade fire, "rebellion (lies)"]

this is ourselves....

the soundtrack of my days most recently has been queen and david bowie's track "under pressure". why? well, how about because it just fits.

" it's the terror of knowing what this world is about"

i had a chance to go on an all expenses-paid trip to palm springs, california sometime between january 23 and february 4. my parents have my aunt & uncle's time-share for two weeks and i have been invited down to lay by the pool. my parents said they would pay for the entire trip.

why wouldn't someone in my situation take this trip? well, how about because my potential new job, the one i don't even know the details of yet, the one that's been dangling in front of my nose since august, would probably be starting right around that time. and that's even IF i were to land that job.

i asked the big boss person if it would be a smart thing or a dumb thing for me to go away for a week at the end of january. she very diplomatically said it probably would be quite shit-timing and apologized that she couldn't tell me the details yet. so, i won't be booking a flight to sun-shiny california. *sigh* i so wanted to go. i could do with some palm trees and swimming pools right about now. i just hope i don't regret passing up a trip for the job i don't even have yet.

"watching some good friends screaming, 'let me out!'"

between the job search, the apartment search and the stapling of many many important pieces of paper with many many numbers on them - i just have been feeling the pressure. and today i cracked just a little bit. i thought i'd been holding up fine, but apparently i wasn't me normal cheery self at my hourly-wage place of employment. by the end of the day 3 separate people had asked me if i was ok. i guess my demeanor didn't fit with my words.

sample conversation :
random nice person popping up through the cubical wasteland : "hey jodi, how are you doing?"
me looking up from my calculator and great stacks of paper : "i'm good. how about you?"
random nice person : "oh, are you sure about that? you don't sound too good."
me : "oh, i'm just feeling the apartment blues. it's rough these days." (meanwhile, i'm thinking to myself, 'well, duh, i'm not doing good. i've soon to have no home and i'm doing some pretty menial tasks here.')

on the flip side of that, about an equal number of people told me they liked my shirt today. you got to look for the small positives!

"pray tomorrow takes me high high higher pressure on people people on streets"

and can i tell you about the apartment search. my roomie and i have been pretty adamant about what we will accept and what we won't. as soon as we realized we were being booted, we somewhat facetiously made a list of things that were "musts" for the new place. it included stuff like a fireplace, french doors, dishwasher, washer/dryer, gas stove, 2 large and equal sized bedrooms, a dining room, a living room a den (or more accurately, the cats' room), ttc accessible, access to the back-yard and the apartment should be on the 2nd and 3rd floor of a house with character. gosh, we're not asking for too much, are we? ;)

the fact is, we pretty nearly have all that stuff now (excluding the french doors, dishwasher and gas stove). it's hard to want to settle for less. then again, since 2006 seems to be a year of big change for me - maybe i should get used to living in a smaller, less luxurious place. i may have to settle for that - but why should my roomie. and she's the one with horseshoes up her ass. i told her the shoes needed to work a little bit harder these days!

over the past week the places we've seen have ranged from :
spacious (but with dirty carpeting, a scary-side door access and most alarmingly - bugs, ewww!)
to tiny (we saw a 2 bedrooms + den that really should be re-advertised as 1 small bedroom + living room & dining room)
to smelly (the place tonight smelled of stinky fried meat. guess it's not a good thing to check out places during the dinner hour.)
to really quite acceptable and nothing quite wrong with it (but still something wasn't right about it. i didn't get the warm-fuzzies and i couldn't see myself living in it)
to non-existent. well, the last one we didn't actually see - but the pictures were just stunning - as was the description. i thought that as soon as we saw it in person, that we'd love it and that the landlord would love us and let us take it. but it turns out that the current tenants gave notice and then took it back a few days later. jerks. so the great place went off the market until later this spring or early this summer. jerks. don't they know that they're in our apartment!

oh well... something is out there. i can feel it coming around the corner. just hope it's not a giant squid.

also - i defy anyone out there to walk down the street listening to madonna's "hung up" and not feel really good about themselves. it's my sure-fire fool-proof way to bring a little spring to my step these days. that and listening to live recordings of david usher shows. thank you david for all the many kindnesses you've done me.

[music franz ferdinand, "do you want to"]

feelin' da love

after not being able to face the day yesterday - today had a much brighter sheen to it. my eternal dangling job lead came a little bit more solid today and i should know full details on monday or tuesday next week. i am the leading candidate, but will have to convince them that i would not be leaving the position any time soon. if that's the only stumbling block, i should be able to do a good job of convincing them that after the year of uncertainty i've had (laid off for a year and recently evicted from my apartment) that i will be looking to root somewhere so solidly that they'd have to set off plastique to get rid of me. i shall be like fleas on a dog. i shall evoke the power of the tree and just not move. even further than that, i will become like the moss and lichens which grow upon said trees. they will not shake me.

i just want a home! both to live in and to work in.

and since right now i'm doing hourly work for them, i did not expect to receive any money for the time when the office was closed for the christmas holidays. well guess again. they estimated how many hours i would of worked, had the office been open and paid me for them. i almost started crying. it was a totally unexpected and lovely surprise. yey. i'm getting teary just thinking about it again.

another lovely thing. i got a ride home from work with about 15 flattened boxes. time to start packing the non-essentials. my problem is that i have spent large portions of my life being a pack-rat. i loved to accumulate and hated to purge. i've gotten better in the past 5 years or so - but i think i may need to purge again. and i have so many books. so, so, so, so, so many books. and i can't bear to get rid of most of them. i will be day-tripping down to the local used bookshops to see if they will buy some, but i hate to sell something i may re-read. same goes for cd's. except i have A LOT i'd like to sell. been-there-and-will-never-do-that-again sort of stuff. *shudders*

and i also was forwarded a project manager job at a web development company. i hate web development and it's not my first choice - but it is a job and i have all the experience and qualifications they call for. not to mention that someone my roomie used to work with is currently a director at the company. that alone should give me an interview. but one can just never tell these days.

[music | franz ferdinand, "evil and a heathen"]

new beginnings

i'm almost ashamed to be writing this here today... it's more not-so-hap-hap-happy news. i really am not a person who dwells on all the not nice stuff, but lately it just seems i'm getting that in spades... soooo....

on january 1st my landlords slipped a note under the door telling me that they need the place for 'personal use' no later than march 1st. that's right i've been evicted.

this is so strange and surreal. no job and now no place to live. i'm beginning to think that i have somehow slipped into someone elses' skin. i'd like my own back please. from a casual glance, i must seem like the most monumental fuck-up out there. i really am not a hideous beast. most people actually describe me as a 'nice' person. bus drivers always say hello to me. people in stores generally want to help me. i don't think i make a bad first impression, or second or third. but who knows. perhaps i am in a massive hallucination. maybe i'm severely mentally damaged and none of my friends and family have bothered to tell me i'm a little bit off. maybe there are no friends and family - maybe they are all in my head.... hmmmm....... must look into this.

all i know is that my current situation doesn't reflect who i am. then again, what image am i holding up against my current state? maybe that image is wrong. holy existential tangent.

the universe seems poised to do any of the following :
push me into a deep crevice. to provide me with untold opportunity and riches here in toronto. to move me to a beach in thailand or portugal.

lovely low-tide beach in portugal. wish i was here.

new beginnings for 2006. my life has been about quite a bit of change lately. i don't mind a calculated risk or an educated gamble... and i think i'm better at those than most... but now the universe seems to be demanding a complete tight rope routine from me. and i don't have time to look to see if there's a net. wish me luck!

[music | nine inch nails, "only"]