As of the last few years, you would be hard pressed to find me without internet connectivity at any time. When I’m not at home or at work, I’m probably clicking away on my Blackberry. At home I’m either on my desktop computer or watching television with my laptop on. I joke about how I might go camping one day when Nature gets free wireless, although honestly I’m kind of serious. (This seems unlikely as apparently Wi-Fi and trees are natural enemies.) Anyway, it wasn’t always that way. It used to be, in those dark old analog days, I would instead never be without a book.

In university I was reading two novels a day at my peak. Now mind you that didn’t leave a lot of time for anything else, but I was well read if a little socially awkward. And I admit to being a book snob of the highest order — give me the classics, old or modern, and let’s turn all the John Grishams and Michael Crichtons and, yes, Harry Potters to mulch and use them to feed short, non-WiFi-impeding shrubbery. (Harry Potter is a children’s book. They are for CHILDREN. They are not clever all-ages fiction, the characterizations are poor, and Harry is a teenage wanker, not a wizard dreamboat who will save you from your humdrum lives, okay? Sheesh. Just stop it.) I have to admit though to never finishing Middlemarch, although I’ve tried three times. I usually love that kind of novel, but every time I start it and get to the, “Ooh, Mr. Casaubon, you may be old but your intellectual pursuits are soooooo fascinating” I want to go watch Cops or something. I can’t explain it.

Okay, anyway, suffice it to say that I am a compulsive enough reader that left to my own devices I will start reading ingredient labels and traffic signs for lack of anything else. So it was kind of surprising that I’ve never really gotten into graphics novels (or long-form comics, or whatever you want to call them). Yes, okay, I admit, my first reaction was a little snobbish too — they’re picture books. I imagined pages of exciting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle stories complete with colorful “ZAP!”s and “KABOOM!”s across panels. But I am here to tell you, fellow lit snobs, that some of these suckers are actually quite good. Like, really good. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I enjoy a good story with good characters, and you can find that, along with pretty pictures. Give them a shot! If you want an official resource you can start with this Time Magazine Top 10 list (most of which I haven’t read yet) or try before you buy with this fantastic selection of free sample volumes (including popular titles like Fables and The Sandman and Hellblazer).

Anyway, read them. As a friend says, they’re good for you.

The Bomb: a companion website to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. (PS: Read The Invisibles.)

A formal academic paper on Comparative Sex-Specific Body Mass Index in the Marvel Universe and the “Real” World. This just in, chicks in comics are often unrealistic!

The 40 Worst Rob Liefield Drawings. I don’t really know who Rob Liefield is, nor have I read anything he’s drawn. But I do know an amusing angry rant when I see one!

Argh! Work is still slowly bleeding the life from me, so I haven’t been in the mood to write much here. I spend much of my non-work time lately flitting around the Internet, not actually doing anything or even completely reading anything. I’ve been drinking a lot of wine lately too — both in the classy connoisseur sense and the wino sense — which helps. As it turns out, wine that comes in a tetrapak is NOT necessarily bad, it may just be Australian.

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The thing about moving to a new neighbourhood, as I did recently, is you have to find new vendors and stuff. New electronics store, new dentist, etc etc. Soooooooo… I went to a hairstylist based on a recommendation from a LiveJournal community, okay? Look, I’m a child of the Internet. I can’t help myself. As it turns out, this place was like the independent movie of hair salons. My hair was cut by a paunchy Scandinavian with yellow fingers named Urs. He kept saying things like, “this is going to be longer on one side, ya, but eet will be funkee.” Oh! And when I arrived he handed me a smock (!), pointed at a very small room full of a very large dog and said sternly, “You put the smock on in there. The dog does not move.” I kept expecting him to challenge me to a game of chess.

It was awesome.

So my second local discovery was VideoMatica, an honest-to-god independent and foreign video place. We went in and looked around, and there were sooooo many movies I wanted to see, but one jumped out at me immediately: Manos, Hands of Fate, as screened by the MST3k guys. I’m not even sure what to say about this. It’s as delightfully bad as you would expect it to be, particularly the bits where everyone just kind of stands around because they either forgot what to say or the writers forgot to write something. Really, what do you expect for a movie made by a fertilizer salesman to win a bet? (Lots of background on the film can be found here).

I also watched Paprika, which was quite good. I’m kind of concerned now though because the dream music from the movie has been stuck in my head for a few days and at any minute I’m expecting to see a parade of singing household appliances and marching frogs. Although, actually, a little Japanese-style insanity would probably make my work week more bearable.

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How Cirque Du Soleil Works. I couldn’t find any exciting tell-all backstage reports (because you just KNOW those crazy Bulgarians and Mongolians are getting up to no good in between shows), but this is a solid overview of how the organization runs.

EnjoyNachos.com: your ultimate source for anything nacho-related.

Work has sucked all the oomph out of me this week, much like the way the Dark Crystal drained gelflings of their life force. “No, young IT person, you must stare deeply into the Exchange Server some more!” Ha ha! Was that geeky enough for you? (Note to self: buy Fizzgig plush and chase the cats with it.) Anyway, a few random links while I have some portion of my brain left.

Stop wasting your precious time on a elevator, and hack it! The New Yorker confirmed that this worked as of a few years ago, so go try it yourself on the way home. If you simply must share you elevator with others, make sure you at least follow standard elevator etiquette.

Canadian milk bags: oh, how my American friends laugh at us and our bags of wholesome milk. They also giggle at Mr. Tube Steak stands. Is nothing sacred? Where is the respect for our proud Canadian food culture?!

I spent an hour today reading One Post Wonder. It’s just a collection of blogs that only ever had one post, and it’s awesome. Some of the posts are lame, some of them are poetic, and at least one is a weird cultural defense of Abe Lincoln’s penchant for “sleeping with other men”. In short, combined they make an excellent zen read.

For the past few years I’ve steadfastly maintained that I am best enjoyed from behind a keyboard. Even with my good friends I tend to reach moments in person where I am struck with anxiety or nervousness or something and just clam up. It passes in a few minutes, but over the years I’ve learned that if I don’t just sit quietly I will blurt out something weird and possibly insane. And I know this because of the infamous “nachos” incident.

Back when I was a wee girl in Grade 10 or so, this boy that I was rather fond of called me out of the blue. This was quite exciting, as you can imagine, so my mother and sister gathered around the phone (perhaps my best friend too — were you there, Ant?) to listen. Lo and behold, he asked me out to the local restaurant for a date to “have nachos or something”. Quickly I replied, “Oh, that sounds great — I’m always hip for nachos!” Hip. For Nachos.  Good lord.

(One more recent example is me reassuring a store clerk who was giving me change from their meager supply that, “No, no, that’s okay.. I loooove dimes.” I love dimes?! That’s what I came up with on the spot?! Sure, quarters and nickles are nice, but give me the majestic dime any day. I may as well just have said, “I will take the precious cargo of coins home and add them to my dime collection because I am, apparently, TOTALLY INSANE.”)

So anyway, I was looking for good conversation tools and starters online, but as it turns out the internet is not the best place to learn about face-to-face communication. Imagine that. This was probably the most useful site, if only because the potential phrasing seemed kind of different but not weird. I did, however, discover what to talk about with librarians and mathematicians, which will be.. almost no help whatsoever.

Special mention goes to this page of random facts. Some of them are interesting, some I already knew, but the standout snippet for me was the fact that “the longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.” I am trying to imagine the circumstances in which one would coincidentally record a chicken in flight, but I’m having the damnedest time. Were they poking the chicken? Just timing them for fun? Was there something else going on at the same time?

Someone get me a chicken and a stopwatch — I bet I can beat that record, and won’t THAT give me something to talk about in those quiet moments.

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Dancing with the Star Wars Stars: forward this video to 3:30 and behold.

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Metal Gear Solid’s Snake bakes a homoerotic cake. No, really.

Lately I’ve been trying to challenge myself to try things that I wouldn’t usually do. Last weekend I had a couple of beers and belted out Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl in front of half a dozen coworkers, which possibly counts as an challenging experience for both myself AND my listening audience. Anyway, this weekend I am doing something equally unlikely but less abusive to others: I am going back to my local crafting superstore and .. crafting stuff.

The last time I went to this chain, years ago, I swore that I’d never go back. Everyone was angry, employees were scarce, and I watched two grown women beat each other about the head for the right to buy the last sprig of silk cherry blossoms. It was like The Road Warrior, only instead of a chronic gasoline shortage the world was no longer able to produce glitter glue and taffeta wire ribbon.

I admit too that as with pretty much everything else I encounter, I’m something of a craft snob. What is ’scrapbooking’, per se? I don’t really get it. I had an acquaintance ask me once if I was “into stamping”, and I found myself equally mystified. So you.. stamp things? With a stamp? Huh. Well okay then.

So anyway, tomorrow I brave the angry craft store patrons and pick up some stuff for a new project. It should be rather nifty when it’s done and I’ll post photos once I get it started.

This Weighted Companion Cube pattern is cute! So cute I have this urge to incinerate it immediately. Or, you could always just dig out your toys and make insane Lego creations. However, in all my craft searches today, nothing — and I mean nothing — beats these Shaun of the Dead knitted dolls. They actually make me want to learn to knit, and that’s saying something.

PS: Here is the website I mentioned a while back where you can make your own cross stitch pattern.

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Study: IT Admins Read Private Email (ABC News)

Well duh.

Everyone in my office went on an early lunch today, leaving me alone for a good 90 minutes. By the time they returned I had claimed the land for the Principality of Deskonia and their good Queen Jessica, and used the printer paper boxes to fortify my cube desk thing. I even had a flag (clearly you need a flag for a good takeover) that prominently featured an angry squirrel.

Sadly I work in a sales company so they just rolled their eyes at the IT Girl and got on with the business of bidness. I bet people at Google make cubicle forts all the time. (Wasn’t there a story a few years ago about them having a real office monkey to boost morale? I never get company primates, or even ungulates. How am I supposed to have the will to go on working?!)

Anyway, I’ve approved an increase in Deskonia’s military spending to fund many tiny trebuchets. I have tomorrow off, and I bet with a little effort I could start an international incident before 5pm.

Learning a new CMS, new templates, new variables, having to find and paste in old posts. Everything looks wrong.

Really, if I could just find a Wordpress plugin that would create witty and amusing and maybe just a teensy bit meaningful posts twice a week I’d be all set.

So I’ve spent a fair bit of my day wasting work time playing with Twitter. It’s actually kind of cool how many of the old school blogging corps are around and still doing (zomg!) Web 2.0 things.

Anyway, I’m still of two minds about all this blogging stuff, even years later. On the one hand I love cool toys, and I love self-expression, and I can already feel that old urge in the back of my head to combine LJ and Twitter and Last.fm and Blackberry mobile stuff and lightning and create some colossal Jessica Central online with an RSS feed that will tell you what I am thinking and feeling and doing every second. It’s online! It’s digital! It’s important!
But on the other hand.. who really cares?

I should write more.

I used to write endlessly, every day, but one of my recent problems is that my style of writing is fueled by life experiences. I need to see things, feel things, think about stuff, try new things, and my brain just naturally starts shaping the inspirations into stories. Honestly, if I’m not talking, I’m wandering around with half of a chapter of something composed in my head.

A few years ago I stopped living. I don’t even know why it happened now. It was just a whole bunch of things combined with a healthy dollop of existential angst, and I just.. stopped. I think a good part of it was probably brain chemistry, but I won’t lie and say it wasn’t also in part self-indulgent. Anyway, for a couple of years I didn’t really leave the house. I had a job in a deeply disfunctional workplace that paid me a stupid amount of money just to show up and not talk to anyone or do anything for 7 hours a day. I stayed home, slept during days when I could, put on weight, surfed the internet, cried a lot. I stopped writing. I didn’t even get my hair cut for a year because I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it. I felt trapped by everything and was, in the truest sense of the word, hopeless.

I’m equally unsure how it stopped. It was just a collision of events. My employer went bankrupt (not surprisingly), my mom passed away, I started talking to people, and I guess to some extent I just .. had to stop living my life that way, or I had to die. It’s funny, I feel kinda new this year, like woke up from a coma and I have to come up with a composite of what Jessica circa 2008 would be like if she had lived the last two or three years. I’ll try anything, read anything, taste anything, go places.

I still get scared. I still have to push myself (yes, challenge myself) all the time so I don’t slide back into weird agoraphobic dead person, but I’m doing it. This morning I got up, threw on some clothes, walked up the road in the sunshine to the electronics store, picked up a big coffee and some sushi, and admired all the colors and the people and the sounds and the smells. It sounds dumb, I know, but it feels like such a victory some days.

So now I’m writing again. Even if it’s just a blog post. Every bit counts.

So in the last 24 hours I’ve been complained at, accused of theft, accused of bribery, kicked two people from the guild, alienated some of the officer corps, been complained at about the complainers, started up the recruitment machine again, had people leave, received completely bizarre messages from people declaring that their friend is no longer good enough for the guild (and they aren’t wrong, either), had people complain about the people complaining about the complainers, and I think a dwarf attempted to blackmail me over stuff that never happened. I’ve always felt that I get to be “the boss” because I make the tough decisions that others don’t want to, but right now I want to climb under the couch and stay there.

Hello Kitty Online has never looked so good.

(Oh, and I have a job interview in an hour. Ahhh!)