Iceberglandia

Yesterday I went out with my sister, my brother in law, and my cousin. We ended up sitting in the patio of the local Casey’s. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even hungry, but apparently everyone else was, and I wasn’t just going to sit and watch them eat, so I ordered 2 lbs of chicken wings to go along with my pint of Stella.

Canadians love their food bland and tasteless, so whenever I order wings I have to make it a point that yes, in fact, I would like to enjoy the spiciest variety they have.
Usually, and this changes from place to place, the options include honey mustard (yuck), BBQ, mild, hot or “suicide”. By “suicide”, they mean they use Frank’s Hot Sauce, so you get the picture.

“What would you like on your wings?”, asked the waiter. Being that in this particular establishment “suicide” wasn’t an option, I merely said “just give me the hottest sauce you have”, knowing full well that no expectations were to be had.
“I’ll bring you the hot ones, and I’ll bring you a little side of a really hot sauce”, he said. “Oooooooooo!”, I joked with my sister while wiggling my fingers in the air, as if to mock fright.

A few minutes later, the waiter brought a little basket with my wings. They looked bright orange and greasy. Hell, they tasted bright orange and greasy. No spice to them, though. They tasted mildly sweet.

After chomping my way half through my order, the waiter appeared and asked if I had tried the “really hot sauce”. Oh shit, I hadn’t even seen it. I had just assumed he’d forgotten about it.

It looked dark brown, thick and not very menacing, to tell you the truth. I was just expecting a smoky flavour (it did, after all, look like chipotle sauce). I dipped a wing in it, and took a bite. Here’s an actual recreation of my first thoughts:

“Mmmm! it’s spicy, it’s smoky… definitely based on chipotle. It is actually… OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT IS THIS! SOMEBODY GET IT OUT OF MY MOUTH! IT TASTES LIKE FIRE! LIKE ACID! I WANT TO DIE!”

I pride myself in eating hot stuff and not being a wimp about it. For fuck’s sake, the salsas I make at home use 15 habaneros and 15 jalapeños. And just like that, I got my ass handed to me by a chain restaurant. I feel humilliated. I feel, well, defeated. I’ll be in my room, crying.

Whatever they put into that salsa, corrosive as it was, tasted good. I’ll try to find out just how much battery acid they added to the chipotles.

The Iceberg.

A new poster por The Dark Knight movie.

Cool, huh? Oh, and apparently, it’s official. They’re not deleting the bodybag scene.

Only 83 days left…

The Iceberg.

About two years ago, I went to The Source (a gadget store, not unlike Radio Shack – in fact, the complete name of the place is ‘The Source, by Circuit City’) with the intention of purchasing a printer. After selecting the model I wanted, cringing over the price, and finally shelling out my 129 bucks, I was informed of a special offer.

Chuckles, across from the counter, told me that in every purchase over 100 dollars, I could get a flashlight for one dollar. “Fine”, I said, not owning one but considering its practical nature during a blackout. So, I had a giant fucking flashlight. The problem is, it uses 3 fucking huge “D” size batteries. You could light up the fucking CN Tower with that much energy.

I used that flashlight once. The light bulb in the room I used to rent went *kaput*, and I needed to retrieve something from behind my desk. Problem is, I forgot to turn the flashlight off.

Then I moved, and since Canadian households prefer not to install lighting in the living room area, I have felt the need for “emergency lighting” on more than one occasion.

Well, today I was going through a pile of stuff I haven’t paid attention to in ages (resumes, CD Roms, even a fucking Guelph Mercury from June 2007…), and guess what I found. A flashlight. Where it came from, I have no idea. But it works!

Funny, finding unexpected stuff when cleaning. Although, nothing beats the 20 bucks I found in my winter jacket when I decided to wash it and store it away until next year. Yay beer money!

The Iceberg.

After a brief review of Wikipedia, I was never able to discover the name of the psychological phenomenon in which… oh, well, let me pose it as a question.

Have you ever thought of something thet either hasn’t happened/hasn’t happened in a while/has no apparent reason to happen, and a short while later, it happens?

Or is it just me? Here’s a couple of examples from my personal experience.

The other day, while at work, suddenly my mind started playing White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ‘65″, a song I hadn’t heard in ages. I said to myself I’d listen to it when I got home, but forgot all about it. I started listening to an online radio station, and after a while, they played that song.

This morning I was still in bed, thinking up the usual stupid stuff, when the thought that I had never actually owned a canadian 100 dollar bill popped up in my head (my pay goes to direct deposit, and the stupid ATMs only hand out twienties). As I rushed to work, I remembered I hadn’t cashed my tax return yet, so I took the slip with me, and sure enough, I was handed “brown money”.

One day, last week, I was reminiscing the “good” ol’ days I spent doing data entry for a couple of months with 3 other guys. Two of them, I have on MSN, and although conversations seldom go beyond “what’s new”, “how’s the weather”, I see them often. The other one, however, faded into obscurity. At least until that same day of my reminiscing. When I got home, I was reading through the local (as in, back home) newspaper sites, when I saw a link to an article that mentioned the place I had worked for. Sure enough, the photograph in the article featured none other than Arturo.

Is this a common thing, or should I get worried that all these three happened within a week? Or should I start writing random numbers down and then try to play the lottery? But most importantly, what is the name of that feeling? It’s not premonition, as I am not foreseeing actual events, it’s not deja vu or any of its siblings… To me it’s just weird.

The Iceberg.

I know it pisses people off when I do it (especially my sisters), but as you can read in the following link, it’s not something I do to annoy people.

I’m diseased, what can I do?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restless_leg_syndrome

The Iceberg

Yesterday I witnessed something that for some odd reason made my heart warm. At first, the cynic in me only said “huh, you’d never see that in Mexico”, but then I started appreciating it a bit more.

Exactly in front of where I live, there is an open area where houses haven’t been built, yet. It is full of shrubs and bushes, which are still leafless. So, it looks kind of ugly. But what makes it look even uglier is the garbage that it collected all through the winter. Now that the cover of snow is gone, you can see all the garbage filthy people dumped there.

Yesterday I ran out of juice with which to mix my drinks, so I decided to take the bike down to the store. When I left the house, I saw there was a lady, and her 3 kids, who decided to make it their Sunday project to clean up said area.

I didn’t say anything to them, and I’m sure they’ll never read this, but I do feel thankful, and I appreciate what they did. I hope I’m not the only one.

The Iceberg

Back when I had used my laptop, I used to have all sorts of emoticons added to my MSN. From the stupid to the awesome, from the little animations to the pornographic… every time I saw someone use one I *might* consider using in the future, I’d copy it.
And the funny thing is, I hardly ever used any of them. But when I did, I used them “wisely”.

For example, I had this “metal horns” one, I used when I said goodbye to friends with my same musical taste. Since the ’shortcut’ to it was, well, “horns”, and I seldom use the word “horns” in everyday dialogue (seldom is the time where gnus, oxen or viking helmets are the centerpiece of my conversation), I never felt the sudden urge to apologize when a little hand appeared in my text, pinky and index pointed upwards.
I had a couple of emoticons of people (or just heads) playing electric guitars, drums, or plain headbanging, but those were used only for emphasis, as in “I’m listening to Soilwork <insert dude playing guitar>”.
And I had a couple that, in the true sense of the word, were “emoticons”… a fist-pounding angry guy, the ever so typical laughing faces, etc., that I used instead of the whole “… you know, that absolutely drives me mad! How a person could act in such manner, and still look at themselves in the mirror…”. A fictional dialogue, but you know what I mean.

Of course, one is but a mere human, with all the flaws that go along with being one, so on occasion, being that I type so goddamn fast (or I just don’t pay attention until after hitting ‘enter’), I made a couple of boo-boos.
No actual examples come to mind, but say I’m engaged in deep conversation with a friend, and the subject revolves around the downfall of one Ozzy Osbourne. Here we are, arguing whether “No More Tears” was his last good album (an opinion which I’ll take to my final resting place), and I’m trying to make the point of “what the fuck is up with ‘goodbye to romance’ anyway?”. Only instead of the actual text G-O-O-D-B-Y-E, a stupid fruit shows up in tears, waving little hearts. Because, on a prior conversation with a female friend, I decided to copy said fruit and shortcut it with the word ‘Goodbye’.

But I’ll be damned if I ever was busted using the stupidest kind of emoticons. How people purposely fill their MSN with shit, is beyond me. It not only makes them look stupid, it makes me feel stupid for talking to them. You know the ones, the ones that decide that somehow, somewhere in heaven someone is smiling down on them because they decided to replace letters of the alphabet or simple concepts with dumbass animations. I mean, seriously, who in their right mind decides to convert a simple, everyday phrase like “OK” into a fucking mess on my screen?
True story: I had a dim-witted friend, a good guy 90% of the time, one of my closest buddies until recently, who haphazardly decided that the letter H had no merit in and of itself, so he had to download a dancing animation to represent it. A spanish-speaking friend, at that. And yes, the letter H is used a lot in spanish. I warned him, again and again, that his stupid antics were not only unfunny, but borderline homicide-inducing. Did he ever heed my warnings? Of course not.
So when I went to Mexico last year, we were hanging out at his place, when he decided to go take a shit, or answer the phone, or whatever. I saw this as an opportunity, being that he was logged on at the time, and changed the shortcut to something else. It took him a while to catch on, but for a couple of months I didn’t have to suffer from that fucking dancing H. Hey, I just might have saved his life!

Long story short, my friends, the moral is, do what I do now. Don’t use emoticons for stupid reasons. When I installed MSN on this here computer, I decided not to use emoticons. Except for a few of the presets. But only when the need arises. Like, if I make a snarky comment, I’ll go ahead and use the idiot facey with the tongue sticking out. Just to clarify that I am not, in fact, an asshole. Or, if I don’t feel like narrating to all my conversationees that “I’ll be right back, the sudden urge to light up a cigarette outside arose in me, and I may take up to five minutes before we continue our exchange”, I’ll just type (ci). And they know exactly what I mean!

Wisely, people, for fucks sake!

The Iceberg.

Today, friday, I got up (not as) early (as I had planned) so I could go pay some bills and buy some groceries.
The weather has been phenomenal all week, and today is the best day, temperature-wise, I’ve seen all year. 24 degrees Celcius, sunny…
I paid my bills, became frustrated at the lack of shopping carts and only bought a bag of sugar (I ran out yesterday on my first cup of coffee). After that, being that it’s warm and it’s friday -although the fact that it’s friday is of no consequence to me, being that I still have two more shifts to go through- I decided to pay a visit to my friendly neighborhood Beer Store.

That means that, as of right now, there are twenty four cans of cold beer sitting not so quietly in my fridge. One of them, in particular, is screaming my name, begging me to drink it.

Problem is, I have to leave for work in about an hour. Sure, one beer won’t get me drunk, but I don’t want to arrive smelling of beer. Plus, if I have one, I’ll be thirsty for more and suffer all day because of it.

On the other hand, though, I would like nothing better right now than to sit outside in the sun, smoke a cigarette, drink a beer and flip through a couple of pages of “Russian for Dummies”.

Fuck it, I’ll come home tonight to 23 cans of beer.

The Iceberg.

Due to my ongoing battle with sleep deprivation, the long periods at work where I am reduced to menial tasks that require no concentration (as opposed to when I’m actually aboard my forklift), and the commute to and from work, but also due to the fact that my life seems to be lacking a lot of things, I have been doing a lot of reflections.
Reflections about who I used to be, what I’ve become, and what happened that caused so much change.

Let me tell you about Maria. Wait, let me be more specific, there are so many Marias everywhere. Let me tell you about the Maria I met in Cancun.

It wasn’t a vacation. At the time, I was studying Tourism, and an uncle lived near Cancun. These two unrelated items came together on a Christmas vacation in which my uncle said he could hook me up with a job in Cancun. You know, tourism and all that.
Of course, I said yes and a couple of weeks later I was on my way.

Said hookup by my uncle didn’t turn out so well, but fuck, I was in Cancun, I had to make what I could out of the situation.
I ended up working at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Now, before yo go all out and envy me, let me tell you, it wasn’t as cool as it sounds. I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say I was stuck on day shift.
I had a routine. Every day when I left at 4, I would walk to the beach, sit on a huge rock and smoke a cigarette. ‘Gitanes’, I smoked back then. Then I’d go to the mall. Fuck around for a couple of hours and go home.

The details of how Maria came to appear in my life are vague, but one day, during my tour of the mall, I saw her. She was a salesperson at a ladies’ boutique. I guess I was immediately impressed by her. Who wouldn’t be?
She had the most perfect light brown skin, a body that made hearts come to a halt, and the kind of facial features angels are sent to hell for envying. And, as I came to know her, one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever encountered.
I remember several visits I made to that store, and the conversations we had. She never explained if she was in a relationship or not, but the couple of times I managed to ask her out, she declined. Not in a “fuck you, perv!” way, but more in the “maybe some other time” way that always left me hungry for more.

Then, my stint in Cancun ended abruptly. I paid one last visit to the mall. I had to see her one last time, maybe exchange phone numbers, addresses (email and facebook were a thing of the future), perhaps continue our friendship…

She wasn’t there. It was her day off.

 
I was thinking about that last night, and how back in the day I actually had the courage to approach an attractive member of the opposite sex. How I somehow managed to create conversation. Now, not so much. What happened?
Sure, back then I was 21 years old, but I don’t think age and/or maturity have anything to do with it. I see people older than me mingling all the time.
Maybe I’m not meant to know.

The Iceberg.

Maybe it’s just a post-winter thing, the obsessing over a warm place. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the beach.

I don’t mean going to Lake Ontario. I mean a real beach, with real sand, real waves, seashells, palm trees…

Of course, when one thinks about the beach, one tends to forget the sunburn, the involuntary mouthfuls of sandy salt-water, the warm beer nestled in a pool of water that was, for a short time, ice. The smell of dead fish, the pigeon crap, the crabs and the thorny vegetation and jellyfish are also soon forgotten. And in essence, the late Bill Hicks defined the whole beach thing as, and I paraphrase, “I don’t see the whole deal with the beach. It’s where dirt meets water”.

But still, it beats grey skies and muddy snow and icy sidewalks and bone-chilling wind gusts.

I want to go to the beach.

The Iceberg.