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Every since my rabbit’s death, I’ve surprised myself at how well I’ve been taking it. Friends would send me condolences by email and by post, and I would just stare at their words and not feel a single thing, like why are they sending me this? Tiggy who?

After a week of this, it started to concern me. Why was I acting like this? I’m not a complete stranger to death. I’ve only ever had one person close to me die, but I’ve never before had to witness the moment where life crossed into death. What was wrong with me? Why was I completely emotionless? Did this mean I just didn’t care about her? What kind of stone cold bitch with no soul was I?

I had two options. Either,

1) I was handling it rationally. My heart was on the same page as my mind: It does no one any good to cry over something you can’t fix. She’s dead. Move on. (Cuts like a knife, but it’s the truth, isn’t it?)

2) I was in denial, and pushing every memory of her away to the secret room in my brain where I hide everything I don’t want to remember.

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My father may be one of the few people on this earth to find the whole worldwide recession slash stock market crash combination amusing. Every day, without fail, he will turn on the TV when he has a free moment just to see how bad things have gotten since he last checked, and when the dow drops fifty million points and another bank goes bankrupt, he yells out the news to whomever is in the house at the time, following it up with, “the armageddon! it’s the armageddon!”

He is having way too much fun with this.

Come with me, my love
To the sea, the sea of love

Cat power - Sea of love

There is a bottle sitting on my bathroom counter right now as I type this, and somewhere between the product description and the recommended usage is a fun fact. “Time is fun when you’re having flies”, it says; and if I could choose one sentence to describe my summer, that one would probably be it.

These last couple months have been amazing and different and somehow groundbreaking, or as groundbreaking as you can be when you only ever take things in small doses. I saw friends I hadn’t seen in many years. I traveled. I hiked up a mountain. I saw a shooting star. I got a tan line. I bought two pairs of nine west heels at $20 each. I never once stepped on a plane.

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In my neighborhood, a couple blocks from where I live, there is a little brown house that sits on the corner of two streets.

Long before I ever moved to this neighborhood, I used to know a girl who lived in that house. Her name was Lauren. She was in my first grade class. She wasn’t very popular. I remember that occasionally, some of the meaner girls in our class would tease her. I can’t remember why. We were friends.

I still know where some of those mean girls are at, today.

First grade was, according to most of my former classmates’ account, a great year. (I say “according to”, because unlike my classmates, I was still recovering from The Worst Year Of My Life.) We wrote and illustrated a school newspaper, had a class store, studied way too many insects (Madame Yvonne was exceptionally fond of them) and sang a whole lot of French songs, songs like C’est L’Halloween.

Before the school year was over, Lauren’s mother died from a brain tumor.

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You know you’ve reached a certain point in your career as a pseudo-blogger when your friends start asking you not to blog about certain things:

The tail-end of a lengthy discussion on those who live life superficially vs. those who don’t (also known as CHANEL, YOU THINK TOO MUCH):

The Friend says: (10:37:11 PM)
You drive me crazy

The Friend says: (10:37:20 PM)
And this is just MSN

The Friend says: (10:37:30 PM)
… Please don’t write a blog on this :P

With more and more of my offline friends, family and acquaintances finding this website (which, admittedly, isn’t hard; all you need to do is google me), the subject of my online writings have never come up more often. Specifically, the question of “You’re not going to blog about this, are you?”

To those offline friends, family and acquaintances, and maybe our mailman: I am on the hunt for my next project and new material. Lock your doors. Maybe even close your windows. But be especially careful what you say or do around me, because you never know—it might just end up on here.

Talking about a piece of gum that dropped on the floor:

“I’m going to go wash this.”

“Don’t wash it! It will only turn sticky.”

“I washed a cookie I dropped on the floor once…”

“Denzil, washing doesn’t help everything.”

“I know… that’s why I don’t take baths anymore.”

9:30 pm, over instant noodles I just cooked for the two of us:

Me: “Denzil… Do you ever wish your butt was bigger?”
My brother: “Do you ever wish your butt was *smaller*?

I cooked a fabulous vegetarian lasagna the other night. The family loved it and I was thrilled. Still giddy from the success of my latest experimental dish, I was idly cleaning the kitchen when my mother walks in and drops the scariest. comment. ever.

“You know, lasagna was always my signature dish.”

“Oh my god, DON’T SAY THAT.”

#1 most terrifying thing about getting older?
WHEN YOU REALIZE YOU’RE TURNING INTO YOUR MOTHER.

From the Vancouver Sun’s article on the Top 100 surnames in the Lower Mainland:

#77 - Wood (664 entries)
An English and Scottish last name, Wood almost always denotes someone who lived in the woods, or who worked as a woodcutter or forester. However, a secondary origin for the name Wood is a nickname for a crazy or violent person, an interpretation derived from the Middle English word ‘wod’, meaning mad or frenzied.

My father, on sharing his personal information on the internet:

“You better not be posting anything about me on your website.”

“Just tell ‘them’ your dad passed away or something.”