How do you spell “relief”–part two

Here’s a series of posts I never knew was going to happen… and now that I think of it, I might even have a part three up my sleeve. For part one, go here.

I distinctly remember the last time I wet the bed.

I was about 6 or 7; far too old to be wetting the bed. I was ashamed. I was confused. And I never told anyone about the events leading up to “the incident”.

I was sleeping soundly, oblivious to the fact that my tiny 6 year old bladder was progressively filling with that last glass of juice I had before bedtime.

Very few dreams stick with you. More often than not, they slip away from you just as you open your eyes and all that’s left is the sensation of what kind of dream you had: “Well… that was a weird dream…”.

Yet, 27 years later, I still remember the dream I was having the last time I wet the bed.

For some reason, I was dreaming about The Cosby Show. The Huxtables were in bed, Mrs. Huxtable was reading a book and Cliff was being a jackass as per usual. He may or may not have been trying to get some.

The dream was a weird combination of me watching the situation unfold (like it was on TV) and being in the bed with them; as them. It was a weird combination of being both The Huxtables at the same time. It was a fucked up out of body omniscient experience.

I remember being Cliff and feeling the sweet relief as his/my bladder emptied, then as Clair, feeling the disgusting warmth spread from his side of the bed to hers/mine. She was shocked and appalled; he was relieved and not as embarrassed as he should have been. As she was screaming at him for wetting the bed, I started gaining consciousness.

My bed felt warm, yet cold, and wet; I woke up and found myself lying in my own puddle of shame. I remember getting up and going to tell my mom what happened (less The Cosby Show dream, of course) and how mad she got as she stripped the wet sheets off my bed. I stood sheepishly in the corner, my head hung downward, avoiding eye contact at all costs. It had been a couple years since my last nighttime accident; she thought I’d outgrown it as much as I had.

After that, every so often, I would have a similar dream (although not featuring The Cosby’s). Basically, I would dream that I needed to go to the bathroom and when I finally found one, that familiar relief would wash over me. I would wake up in a full-blown panic; hoping beyond hope that my bed was dry and my bladder was full. They always were, but I was always afraid that one time, they wouldn’t be.

Over time, that dream has occurred less and less, but, oddly enough, I had that dream last week. It hadn’t happened in such a long time that I had blocked out the memory completely; it’s like it never happened. But as I woke up with a slight feeling of dread, all I could think about was the time that Bill Cosby wet the bed. Never again, will I be able to look at Bill the same.

And now, neither will you.

Adventures in Internet Dating–part 4

Just because I know you guys love these so much… here’s another installment of That White Girl’s adventures in internet dating.

Even though my POF account is currently hidden so I don’t show up in the general populations’ searches, I will go on and browse profiles.

There was one guy I found that had far too many muscles for his own good. On his profile it said: ******* NO CEREAL DATERS!!!! *******

The number of asterisk's may or may not be exaggerated. It took every willpower bone in my body (I have like six) not to send him this asking what exactly was wrong with being a cereal dater.

I do believe Cap’n Crunch is a good man; better than most, even.

Then there’s this other guy; his profile picture was him hugging an acoustic guitar, his profile said he sang/played rock and he had a link to SoundCloud that contained only metal songs without any lyrics.

I found him to be contradicting and I thought that was a good icebreaker so I basically sent that to him in an email, giving him a bit of a hard time because he said he sang but all his pieces were instrumental. Here’s how our conversation went down.

Douchebag: Singing isn’t easy and my voice isn’t there yet. You do know that was entirely me playing guitar bass and drums, right? I wrote the song too. I have over 50 songs, of all genres. Check out my SoundCloud now – I put other songs up!

I went back to his SoundCloud and there were a bunch of new songs posted. Genre of all songs: metal (without lyrics) or metal hiphop (rap over heavy metal). Very diverse.

TWG: Singing isn’t easy but makes playing that much more fun (for me at least). I like the song “Acoustic”; nice guitar piece.

DB: So you like classical guitar? Yuck. I made that song to mock my old music teacher. Playing chords and singing some oldie is easy. Try playing something off beat, that has many changes in sound and beat and singing something.

TWG: Not necessarily classical guitar, but I’ll play an acoustic over an electric any day. I prefer the organic sound and not having to fiddle with dials and knobs.

DB: You do know the vast majority of acoustic guitars made today are acoustic electric, right?

TWG: Putting a transducer into an acoustic guitar doesn’t make it an electric guitar. Even when you plug it in, it’s still an acoustic, it’s just amplified. You do realize you’d get the same effect from a microphone, right??

He totally got under my skin for some reason but I never heard from him again so it all worked out.

Onwards and upwards, right, folks?

You can make a sandwich out of anything!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I haven’t been so good on the whole cooking front lately. As I was driving home this evening I was trying to formulate some sort of meal plan so I could avoid the drive-thru, restaurant or the singles-section at Safeway.

As I mentally combed through my edibles, the best thing I could come up with was a meatloaf and cheese sandwich. Which should have got me pondering about my lack of will to live, but mostly it made me think about a conversation that happened the other day.

We were out for Father’s Day dinner, the topic of sandwiches came up. My brother declared that you can make a sandwich out of anything. My, very pregnant, sister-in-law asked if a sandwich could be made out of spaghetti (that was my dish of the evening and apparently the most far-fetched idea she could come up with).

I said yes, having witnessed it at work, by Gorm, on a number of occasions. My brother, incredulously, added that of course you could, in fact, who hasn’t had a spaghetti sandwich. She silently gave him a look that either said “I haven’t and I can’t believe you have” or “I’ll kill you in your sleep tonight”.

Which got us talking about the best and worst non-traditional sandwiches ever made.

My Uncle John, being one of the youngest in a family of 11 brothers and sisters, with numerous nephews and nieces milling about trying to get a free meal, came up with a horrifying sandwich that would deter all those looking for a bite. After a few years of eating it, he came to like how it tasted and still enjoyed how he didn’t have to share the sandwich with anyone.

Sometimes he’d mix it up and incorporate cheese-whiz into the atrocity.

On the same side of the family, our cousin, Chris, had a strange affinity to cheese. Don’t get me wrong – cheese is great, but watching him devour his favourite sandwich was nauseating to say the least.

His stomach-turning sandwich consisted solely of the thickest slabs of cheddar cheese possible, drenched in an ungodly amount of yellow mustard, sandwiched between, well, two pieces of bread and microwaved to liquefy the cheese. Sometimes, he ditched the bread altogether and just set up shop on the couch with the Costco size brick of cheese and mustard bottle (sans microwave, because that would be gross).

Which brings us to the sandwich that my brother created that I completely erased from my memory banks. And not due to sheer disgust; it was actually a really great sandwich.

The Burrito Sandwich: take two pieces of bread, butter and salt & pepper both sides. Cut burrito in half so it fits on the bread. Put hot burrito between the bread and enjoy!

My sister-in-law was horrified, I reminisced about how good it was, while my brother tried repeatedly to convince her it was a tasty treat. The following conversation ensued:

Work Shenanigans

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have some new office-mates. They both happen to be of Asian descent. They also both happen to be jerks.

Not really.

But since they’re Asian they are more likely to eat weird shit on a day-to-day basis. I’m white and the stuff I eat is pretty… … vanilla. Definitely on a world scale, but even on a Canadian scale.

So, naturally, they’ve made it their mission to “expand my horizons”. It’s a game they love and a game I’m disliking more and more. 

The first time it happened was a couple weeks ago when Geiger brought in “Taiwan’s most popular snack food”, which was some fish/shrimp cracker-y things. I’ve had things like that previously and they’re pretty okay, so I had one.

What I didn’t realize was that this particular brand of snack food contained a dehydrated fish inside each packet.

What I also didn’t realize was that when Geiger found the fish that she would think it would be good idea to make me eat it. I also didn’t realize that The Ninja would agree. It took some prodding, in the form of both of them chanting my name, but eventually I ate the fish.

It was small so I thought it wouldn’t be bad, but it was concentrated. As I crunched through the dehydrated carcass of this little fish, my mouth was perfused with a very strong fish flavour. It was basically like eating 4 cans of tuna in one bite.

The next time was a few days later when a co-worker brought in candies from Thailand, one of which was durian flavoured. I was asked if I liked durian, I said that I had never tried it, but I’d smelled it, so that was enough for me.

That wasn’t enough for them. The Ninja went and got me a candy and then they started demanding I eat it.

Eventually I caved and put the candy in my mouth. And then promptly spit it out because it was horrible! They laughed and said that it wasn’t in my mouth long enough for it to count. They threatened to get me another one.

The conversation moved to “what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten”; Geiger won that contest by saying that she once ate pig fallopian tube. She said it wasn’t bad, it was just a skinny tube that was chewy, kind of like an elastic band.

A little while later, The Ninja said “Hey, Heather….” and when I turned around he was presenting me with an elastic band served on a napkin. He tried the chant that had worked previously.

The few days later, I heard The Ninja say “Hey Heather… you want one?” My heart filled with dread and when I turned around he was offering me a cookie… I was surprised.

I’m not sure if his predominant reaction was amused or offended.

After repeated pleas that I did not want “Make That White Girl Eat Weird Shit” to be the new game, The Ninja came up with a new game: “Make That White Girl Say Things in Cantonese Without Telling Her What The Words Mean Until She Uses Them In Really Inappropriate Ways”.

Lucky for me, I tend to use English words in really inappropriate ways so it’s never too long before I find out what they’re teaching me to say.

Don’t fear the Reaper

You might remember my series of posts about Windows 7 ruining my life. If not, that’s okay, you don’t have to read them. Just know that there were a lot of them because I was angry and bitter (which is a bad combination when you have a blog).

The gist of the issue was that I was unable to record music in real time on a brand new laptop because of latency problem associated with Windows 7. I returned the laptop and several months later, returned to the store and purchased it again, content with the fact that I would keep my suffocatingly slow desktop for my music projects.

In that time, because I was never really content, I tried different interfaces and work-arounds but nothing seemed to work. One day, I had my friend Brian over and we ended up messing about on my desktop for recording. We ended up installing a better program called Reaper and then it promptly lost all recording capabilities.

We quickly uninstalled the “better” program and restored everything to it’s previous functioning state.

A few weeks later, I brought my laptop over to Brian’s house in order to figure out the recording issue once and for all. He suggested installing Reaper. Even though this would have been immediately rejected had he suggested it at my house a couple weeks earlier, I accepted his suggestion because the worst that could happen was that I still wouldn’t be able to record music on my laptop.

After a quick installation and a quick plug in of a microphone, we did a test.

I was recording in real time. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I was astounded that it could be so easy when it had caused so much strife over the years. Seriously years. It’s been nearly 3 years.

So, what changed? In order to try and make a certain interface work, I had installed a generic audio driver, ASIO4all. As the name suggests it’s supposed to be compatible with everything.

Reaper is a more advanced recording program than the program I was previously using, Audacity, and has the ability to select different drivers for the program to function. Instead of selecting the audio driver in my computer (the one that causes the blasted latency issue I loathe), I selected ASIO. And it fixed all my problems.

Well, all my problems relating to recording on my laptop anyway…

Foosball and Beyond

This is a story that is well over two years in the making. You may recall my posts about Foosball. If not, that’s okay. The gist of it is that my place of work has a foosball table and there have been a number of foosball related activities over the years (tournaments, olympics, fundraising etc). As a result, a couple years ago, I started learning how to play foosball with never having stepped foot in front of a table before.

Gorm is ridiculously good at foosball; he took me under his wing, showed me the ropes and kicked my ass in the process.

As my skill increased, so did my expectations of the game. As I began to be able to coordinate my men and learned to defend my net, I started expecting better results from myself than I had reason to expect.

This led to, what has been described as, devastating lows of foosball. Which basically means that when I lost, I made a scene.

Whenever I threw my typical temper tantrum, the same person would happen to be in the lunch room, I’ll call him The Ninja because he always seemed to appear out of nowhere. This is a person with whom I never really spoke. Nods of acknowledgment and a "Good Morning" here and there, but that's about it.

It was unfortunate, to say the least, that this is the person who had to witness me at my all-time foosball low. Every. Single. Day.

The only good thing out of that situation was the fact that The Ninja made reference to me in his farewell email when he left the company. A special feat considering we had exchanged less than a dozen words in the 8 years of “working together”.

Fast forward a few months. I made supervisor at work and, as a result, ended up sharing an office with the manager.

Fast forward a year. The company that The Ninja went to, basically went belly up and he was laid off. It just so happens that he’s skilled in mysterious ways. I guess you would expect nothing less from a ninja. It also just so happens that we still needed his expertise and managed to bring him back on. He is now working closely in my department and I have conversations with him daily.

Fast forward another 6 months. We finally filled the second supervisor position and in order for the new supervisor and I to be in close proximity, the manager kicked me out of the office and placed us in an office with The Ninja.

Not only is The Ninja sneaky, but he’s also extremely observant and has an excellent memory. He also is willing to share the information that he compiles. He’s made a point at telling me about my foibles.

For one, when I talk to him and/or my staff, he gets the distinct impression that he’s talking to a school teacher. An elementary school teacher. Not so much the words coming out of my mouth as it is my demeanor. I’m not sure what’s worse.

He also pointed out that I tend to mimic people. Not in a bad I’m-going-to-make-fun-of-you kind of way, but if someone says “Hi Heather!” all sunshine-y, I’ll say something back in the same way. If someone grunts my name, I do the same. I thought that I was mostly aware of this (it’s can be a bit of a fun little game for me), but today when the person I was talking with left the office, The Ninja turned to me and asked if I’d caught myself doing it.

I’m likely to become very self conscious of my actions, despite the fact that he claims they aren’t bad things. Mere observations. Sure…

Happy (actual) 200th Blog Post!!

Holy Milestone, Batman!!

This marks my 200th blog post. I know.

Believe you me, I never expected to get here. Honestly, I probably would have expected to get to 200 words and call it quits. I’m sure you find it hard to believe, since I’m normally so long winded, but it’s true.

My thought would be that I would have a really great post for such an event. But that’s just not the case. This will be a mish-mash of random crap. You’re welcome.

I recently purchased an electronic drum kit from my friend Dave, a.k.a. the worst friend ever. Shortly after, I had my friend, Brian, over and he spied it with his little eye sitting unassembled in the corner. He was horrified that such a thing could happen and demanded (read: hinted repeatedly) that it should be set up.

I allowed him the pleasure. Partially because he really wanted to, but also because I had no idea how to do it myself. Truth be told, I was planning on calling him or Dave to help with the process when I got the inkling to do so.

Now I just got to learn how to use all four limbs independently. Not going to be easy. But it will make music day much more interesting!! You know, when someone that can play drums comes over.

Throughout Brian’s visit, and his follow up visit to make sure I could use my set up properly, he brought a little friend of his. His name is Hank. And he’s a dog. During this visit, Brian also taught me something:

Yeah, that’s right. I gif now. When I was trying to determine if my EZ-post-it software could upload gifs to my blog, I discovered that it was going to be my 200th post. I promptly unpublished it and decided to make it the most epic, memorable post of all time.

And then I sorely disappointed my readers. I’m sorry.

In an attempt to make it up to you, and also practice my new found gif skills, I made something for you that shows exactly what I was thinking when I posted my “Hey Hank” trial.

And that monstrosity is my 200th post.

It’s bound to get better from here.

Thanks so much for your support, or at least for keeping your judgment to your inside voice.