you may know him as Plato or Tom Cruise

Last weekend I picked up a box from storage at my mom's because she's finally forcing the kids to get their stuff the hell out of there. "You've got houses now! Store your junk in your own hallways!" (Fair enough.)

So in this box I found all kinds of books that I thought I'd lost and had silently cursed friends of mine for borrowing and not returning, those bastards.

Anyway, one of the great finds was an old letter from my younger sister, something she mailed to me when I was 20 years old and attending UBC in Vancouver, when she was about 16 and still in highschool back in Ontario. She came out for two weeks: one week spent with my parents, skiing I think, and one week spent alone with me, on the rampage, in the city.

On one side it says:

TOP SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL, PRIVATE

IM COMING!

I come March 4. I will be there at 10:00 PM your time. I leave March 21 at 2:30 PM your time. That's 376.5 hours of me in B.C. YIKES. let's see that's 1 week together.

You know the folks were really worried after the phone call. DO you think I was too harsh saying you were probably stoned? NAH, they need to be subjected to truth MOST of the time.

I have ASTHMA! EAT IT
BYE! HI! BYE; Hi. Bye? HI?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The front of the letter is this, which I had as artwork on my walls for most of my 20s.



In case you have trouble reading the small print, they are random supposedly-inspirational quotes she hacked out of a friend's religious teen magazine to re-jig as satire. (So very post-modern and absurdist, even in her teens.)

But of all the quotes, my favourite is her summary:

He thinks, he speaks, he makes history! His name is mankind, you may know him as Plato or Tom Cruise.

Tomorrow I fly to Whitehorse, to visit this same sister. (Now she's the one who lives in the cool town that delivers fun and adventure.) I'll be with her for almost a month. I come July 21 at 12:10 AM her time and leave at 7:35 PM her time on August 17. Yikes! That's about 667.4 hours in the Yukon (and Alaska). (And awesomely close to 666 hours.)

"I'm not tiresome"

It may not be everyone's style, but I recently watched the movie Metropolitan (in installments, usually over a bowl of cereal each morning), and now I'm recommending it to everyone.

It's about debutante parties and a little group that attends them. In the eighties. Over Christmas. In Manhattan. It's talky, and low-budget, and ironic, and sweet, and a bit preposterous. In other words, even better than you can imagine.

more tired than Lili von Shtupp

...though not for the same reasons as Lili. (von Shtupp was the singing whore in Blazing Saddles, or the "teutonic twat" as Hedley Lamarr calls her. I do love how Mel Brooks works Yiddish into everything.)



A horrible sleep deficit has accumulated over the last few days and, writing this at 10 PM, my eye lids are actually stinging with fatigue.

Some folks have asked when I'm leaving on my trip north -- with my excitement brimming over in the last post, many have assumed I was already gone. But no, departure date is July 20.

If I don't post this lame little ramble and go to bed immediately, my head is going to thump on the desk and I'll have to sleep right here.