(Not an actual rock star)

I've always wished for musical talent - to be able to play an instrument adeptly, to sing powerfully, hey even to be able to carry a tune. I would form a rock band and write songs about stickin it to the man; timeless ballads called "Hazel-Eyed Nerd" and "You Make Me Feel (Like a Teeny-Bopper)"; tragic tunes like "Oops, Scotsburn Screwed Up Again." When my record went platinum I'd donate my profits to environmental causes and adopt lots of babies from developing countries.

If I were queen of the world all this would be reality.

Ahhh

A slight lull in the end-of-term madness and it feels really good. I caught up on my sleep last night and am (almost) ready to jump back into all the things on my to-do list.

Wednesday was Awards Night - the Poli-Sci Society won Society of the Year and I got the C-Store Manager's Award. That was really nice because I've felt a lot of frustration lately over things that have been happening in the store and it's caused me to worry that maybe I'm becoming one of those nutso type-A personalities and will die of a heart attack at 35 from self-induced stressed.

The night was Greek-themed, although they didn't serve Briam like Matt told me they were going to. Unless the caterers thought that that unusual steamed julienne-vegetable thing was briam. It was good, but definitely not Greek food as I know it. Then they brought out the desserts and there was baklava. I cheated and had 3 pieces - justified it because not many people had any, they ate the strawberry shortcake and chocolate mousse instead. Uncultured, tell ya. Most didn't know what it was...and I couldn't let it go to waste...baklava is my kryptonite, my favorte food ever. It tastes like sex - there's just no other way to describe it! Yummy.

I had to leave the awards ceremony early to finish my Social Policy paper - it ended up taking until 4 in the morning. I got 3 hours of sleep because I had to open the store at 8 yesterday. And it was a long day - not least because somebody dug through the staff food in the back of the bottom shelf of the milk fridge and took my soy milk and some staff member foolishly sold it to them even though we don't sell that brand at the store. Annoyed is an understatement. So after work I finished up some last-minute assignments, went to class from 3-7 then had a group meeting that went way longer than it should have. I finally left campus around 8:30 and headed over to Adam's where I promptly fell asleep while he played his silly computer game (Thursday night is WoW raid night).

Finally well-rested, I have lots of cooking and cleaning and other domestic-goddess-like things to do. Anything's better than more research papers at this point...

I'm not procrastinating

There are dishes to be done and a research paper to work on - and not much time left in which to do it. But I've been going pretty steady for most of the day. Finished my philosophy essay wit plenty of time to spare, which impressed me because usually these things end up being utterly last-minute no matter how early I start them - something about being a perfectionist. But at this point I'm just ready to be done. And that attitude has actually encouraged me to skip a lot of my usual procrastination.

Jenn's off at a movie with some of her friends...just before she left she decided to describe some of her favorite scary-movie scenes to me and then proceeded to leave me alone in the apartment. My big secret: I'm a total wimp. Let me qualify that. I can jump off sketchy bridges in Central America but I'm a total movie wimp. 28 Days Later freaked me out so much that I'm still working up to watching Sean of the Dead. Yeah. That much of a weiner. So now I'm all nervous, sitting around the apartment alone with the cat. And we all know that cats are sketchy. I turned on some Hawksley to soothe my nerves.

Bootlegger has, sadly, decided to stop selling Jones Soda. Sad. That was the only place nearby where it was available to the best of my knowledge. Oh well, I could do without all the sugar anyway.

Hell week is upon me. I'll let you know how it goes.

You are Dark Chocolate

You live your life with intensity, always going full force. You push yourself (and others) to the limit... you want more than you can handle. An extreme person, you challenge and inspire the world!

What Kind of Chocolate Are You?

Mmm chocolate. Long day.

This message was brought to you by your dentist

Somehow she always knows just how I'm feeling...

I had a filling done yesterday and for soem reason my dentist (who is normally awesome) put three needles in one side of my little face...I was frozen up to my eyeball on the right side and it didn't wear off for about 4 hours. Then once it did my jaw hurt where the needles went in and it still des - it's hard to opne my mouth far enough to eat. I have now sworn off chewy foods even though I am so in love with strawberry mentos.

What made it all worth it was knowing what the evening held...Jenny and Jennalle and I went to Dio Mio for veggie burgers and sorbetto, then arrived alte at the Cohn - turns out Hawksley didn't have an opening act so we missed the first two songs but they were from the new CD, which I bought at Sam's and am listening to as we speak.

The show was fabulous - the setting was well-suited to the more subdied nature of Treeful of Starling, and he performed a bunch of his earlier works as well. It was different than the show in October at the Marquee, which was more of a straightforward perform-the-songs-and-make-the-audience-all-want-to-touch-themselves kind of rock show. This one was more stripped-down, just him on a variety of guitars, a banjo and a xylophone, plus Mr. Lonely on the piano. So he played with what was available - a lot more vocal manipulation and theatrics. And as always, intensely sexy lyrics delivered in that passionate voice. *LOVE*

I bought a hat. It's really cute.

After the show we went across the street to the Dal SUB because the Cohn bathrooms had huge lineups. They were having '80s Night at the Grawood so we couldn't resist stopping by for a couple of hours and dancing to Cyndi Lauper and the Beastie Boys while drunk students in neon spandex stumbled around us.

"I was dropped, and I'm okay"

Andrea Dorfman = damn cool.

I've been getting up extra early lately because I've had all these professional-y events to go to lately - the Women in House reception Tuesday, my shadowing placement Wednesday, then the Tri-Mentoring dinner tonight. And I just invested in a flatiron so my hair looks super hot. On Tuesday at school I would occasionally be talking to somebody about something completely unrelated, then they would suddenly tell me how much they liked my hair. I felt a little like...Belinda Stronach, in a way.

So yesterday I job shadowed Dave Wilson, MLA for Sackvile-Cobequid (my former riding) as part of the Women in House events. It was soooo totally wicked...I got to sit in on the Public Accounts meeting while they questioned Ernie Fage, former minister of Economic Development, over the issue that journalists have affectionately named "potatogate." It was absolutely fascinating, at least for a Poli-Sci nerd like me, to see this guy who had voluntarily agreed to sit before the committee (of course, the optics would have been pretty bad if he hadn't) and then refused to answer any relevant questions, hiding behind a very broad interpretation of cabinet confidentiality. What was interesting was that he eventually slipped up during the media scrum afterwards and blurted out one of the things that he had refused to answer at the meeting itself. Even more interesting is that the Herald journalist, at least, didn't comment on that fact in the paper today. I mean, I'm just a lowly poli-sci student and hearing that admission made my head spin around immediately but apaprently a trained journalist didn't pick up on it or something.

Seriously though, there was a 45-minute media scrum after the meeting, between them interviewing Fage, Michel Sampson (Liberal - I'm not sure if I spelled his last name right) and Graham Steele, the NDPer who did the questioning at that meeting. It was pointed out to me that for politicians, dealing with the media like that is a total mind game, because out of a 15-minute interview, when you're having questions hurled at you from all directions, they'll probably pick one or two sentences to quote so you need to amke sure that every sentence you say is something that you wouldn't regret if it were taken out of context and printed. And that's exhausting.

Then I went to the NDP caucus office and got to sit in on a little strategizing session of the 3 members of the Public Accounts committee (Dave Wilson, Graham Steele and Maureen MacDonald) and it was just sooo neat to see how you have to kind of guess what the other parties are going to do and then swing with the punches when they do something different. Before I was thinking that I might eventually want to go into politics. Now I'm thinking that I definitely want to eventually go into politics! And if I can get a job working for the NDP or the Advisory Council or some other related organization next Fall, holy crap I will just die. So awesome. And I don't care if that makes me a total nerd. I am keen and proud. (haha keen and...keenan. never mind.)

So Adam took me to dinner at Mexico Lindo last night and then actually agreed to go to the Advisory Council (on the Status of Women, in case you're all wondering who I'm talking about) movie night for International Women's Day. How lucky am I? It was a bunch of shorts by female Nova Scotian filmmakers and they were quite good despite the array of technical difficulties involved.

Today I had a sort-of debate in Policy Analysis...we had to defend the recommendations we made in our group project on the African Union. I think we did pretty well...although it's pretty hard to make suggestions for African development that everybody hasn't heard a million times before and aren't utterly disillusioned about. oh well, the prof isn't a tough marker and we're practically done that class for the year as of Tuesday when we pass in our final report.

The Tri-Mentoring closing dinner was tonight (overcooked pasta, although it was a vast improvement over the plate of raw vegetables that Aramark fed me at the last scholars' luncheon) and I somehow found myself sitting at the VIP table with the president of the University etc, as well as Diana Whalen's husband, although I didn't find that out until after dinner when he had left. Diana is a fantastic lady and a huge supporter of Women in House.

So my mentor Andrea and I made plans to go out for drinks sometime in the next couple of months and she's still trying to arrange an interesting day when I'm available so that I can kind of follow her around and get a feel for the job. She is so awesome.

Sorry for the long rambling post...it's just been a crazy couple of days. I'm sure you all understand.

P.S. Wednesday after I got home, Hipster-in-Training and I sat around online looking up anagrams of our own names. The best one for mine was "anal rad ex." Mt full name proffered ups ome pretty nonsensical ones, but Adam's was a veritable gold mine. The best was "a laid mauve rug" although "a veda mail guru," "a guava deli rum" and "a miraged uvula" are also fairly awesome. So nerdy but so very, very wicked cool.

It's only been a week?

Holy Crap.

Last Sunday I went to visit my sister Bee (nickname)after a too-long absence. It's funny how three-year-olds develop fixations...first we watched Finding Nemo. Then we pretended to be characters from Finding Nemo. Then we played with her LeapPad (a phenomenal toy for kids) - using the Finding Nemo book. Then she came over to my place to see the fish and harass the cat, and left a very happy girl.

Other than that I've been obscenely busy...didn't get nearly as much done over Spring Break as I had planned to, and with Women in House coming up this coming Tuesday and the post-midterms shoot-me-now part of thes emester upon us, there hasn't been much time to breathe. Or to post, which apparently has led certain readers (who you'd never suspect!) to aimlessly playing with my site's pet hedgehog Stevie. So cute.

But yeah, Women in House has pretty much come together but it was a stressful process for me because we had to change the date - and delay the sending-out of the invitations as a result - to accommodate the Minister responsible for the Status of Women. However, it was apparently her departmental secretary who was handling her commitments for that day, and when the new Premier shuffled the cabinet she ceased to be respnsible of the SOW and there wasn't enough communication with her assistant so nobody contacted me. And the Legislature was called on Friday and she now has a bunch of ministers' meetings and can't make it on the day that we specifically chose because it was convenient for her. But because of the miscommunications, I didn't find this out until Friday afternoon when I called three numbers trying to finalize some details and her assistant informed me of it. So it's a little frustrating but it'll just magically work somehow, like it did last year.

Friday I went to lunch at The Wooden Monkey with my mentor, a really wonderful lawyer who the Mount matched me up with. We talked about things like resolving the ethical/moral conflicts that can come up in practicing law...it was really helpful because she's coming from a similar place to where I'm coming from - she went to alw school "to become a better activist" and now works for a big law firm where she's learning how to balance her beliefs with the legal code of ethics (which is different from the average person's, to be sure) and how to influence clients, as their legal counsel, to do the right thing. So it was a great conversation. And I had a seitan sandwich which was absolutely phenomenal.

The rest of the weekend was bascially work work and more work, and today I'm going for a late lunch with my family, although right now it's 11am and I'm finishing off my brunch of a fried tofu sandwich. I was looking at those picturesfromt eh Attic and in the last one my arm looks so skinny and gross. I'm not one for criticizing my own body - I generally don't see the point of anything besides body love - but it's GROSS!!! So I've decided that I need to eat even more and put on some weight before I fade away. It's touch being a skinny bitch...lots of other women get jealous (even though they lookk fabulous) and accuse us of having eating disorders. So this is me defending the skinny bitches: we have body issues, too! And how do you think it feels when your jeans size (0) implies that you don't even exist?! Thinka bout it!