I’m not going to lie – my life got millions of times better when I just started letting my hair grow all over the place with no real regard for common decency. If you’ve got the genes for it, I recommend going for the gold like I have.

I’m not going to pretend like I’m suddenly going to start updating this thing again, but who knows. I didn’t think I’d be some twenty-something yuppie who drives a Mazda and is planning on buying a condo this year, but that happened. Things just happen. The only part of my life I can really control is the frequency of haircuts. And I really do hate those.

How’d he get in there? Can he get out? The answer is no. He lives there now and I will never help him escape.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is in it also. He sums up my feelings on the movie pretty well: “I think ‘Magnolia’ is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. And if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll fight them to the death.”

In any case, it has been my favourite movie for over a decade now! That is really impressive and shows consistency and gumption.

Other movies that once held my “Favourite Movie Ever” title include:

• Chasing Amy

Last Action Hero

• Quick Change
• The Secret of Nimh
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
• Network
• Home Alone
• Rookie of the Year
• Gross Point Blank

That’s a weird list!

So Dalhousie University, with is kind of the university I went to – but not in the sense that I graduated from there or applied there or, really, liked it all that much (it is complicated) — has a big advertising campaign going in Toronto right now. I saw this subway ad on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Sorry for the crappy picture: I was doing my best to NOT make it look like I was trying to take covert pictures of those two dudes across from me.

“Quidditch, anyone?” the ad says. And then there are people dressed like Harry Potter. What the fuck, Dalhousie. You have a medical school. You’re one of the bigger universities in Canada. You’re part of the entirely fictional Canadian Ivy League. (Sometimes.) And you decide to spend money advertising the fact that there’s some club on campus that plays Quidditch? A fictional sport from Harry Potter? Can these kids even fly on their broomsticks? Or do they just run around with the stick between their legs making wooshing sounds?

Because the wooshing sounds would just push me right over the edge.

I don’t really love Michael Moore films or anything (except Canadian Bacon a little bit) but I hate the people who always crawl out of the woodwork after every one of his movies and pretend like they have all sorts of knowledge as to what constitutes a ‘documentary’.

Anyway, it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written on the internet if only because the reaction in the comments section was hilarious, and it still gets comments fairly regularly. (It’s a first-page google hit for “Lies in Sicko”.)

Today’s point of order: Christmas is kind of awesome and I dislike anyone who claims differently. This year, once again, I spent the holiday at my parents’ cottage near Minden Hill, Ontario. According to Minden’s website, ‘Minden Hills has hundreds of things to “see, do and experience”‘. This is generally true in a strictly literal sense, provided a heavy emphasis is placed on the ’see’ part. You can see trees and rocks and etcetera. In the winter, these things are covered with snow. In the summer, less so. That sounds simplistic because it is.

It’s one of my favourite places ever.

I got lots of things for Christmas. My favourite gift is a small fridge designed for storing bottles of wine. The box calls it a “wine cellar” but that’s probably an exaggeration. It’s not underground. It’s in my kitchen. It is not a cavernous room with many shelves and bare brick walls. It’s a 3-foot-high black box with a digital read-out.

I’ve been wanting to become more of a wine guy for several years. Of all the ways to get drunk regularly, being into wine seems like the most sophisticated. Someone who stocks 4,000 cases of beer in his basement would generally be looked down upon as a disgusting vagrant with a major problem or maybe just a dude with memory problems who doesn’t understand that it’s not the 1920s anymore but — and this is the most important point I will make today — someone who stockpiles wine is totally a-ok. They’re just a ‘collector’. And a classy one at that.

My own wine collection will begin with my “wine cellar”, which I set up in my kitchen today. I’ve spent the last year trying to learn more about the types of wines available. Inevitably the only one I can remember is “Riesling” but, oddly, that’s generally all I’ve needed to know. Whenever someone is speaking of a brand of wine, I can remark that “their Riesling is interesting” and instantly connect. Only a real wine guy would say something like that — something so vague and uncritical.

Anyway, after I became an expert on the Types of Wine That Are or Are Related to Rieslings, I decided that I needed some sort of wine rack before I could go any further with this new hobby of mine. This is something I do a lot when faced with a task or goal: I’ll decide that completion of the task is impossible without first attaining some trivial item. It usually buys me a lot of extra time.

Everything has come together as of this Christmas, and I think I am ready to step into 2009 as a Wine Guy. I know what a Riesling is! I have a wine cellar! I like to drink things that can blur my vision! I even learned, today, what the proper temperature to store wine at is. Shit just got fucking REAL.

Other points of interest: Saw two movies over the last week. Seven Pounds was, and is, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it because maybe it’s possible if you have severe mental abnormalities you might enjoy this movie, but let me just say this: there’s a lot of ways to effectively tell the story of Will Smith fighting a deadly Jellyfish. And the minds behind Sounds Pounds didn’t use any of them.

Also saw Blindness which was also pretty goddamned terrible. It’s one of those movies whose badness sneaks up on you. After you view it, you’re like “Huh. Not bad. Nice cinematography.” Then, later, you’re like “What the fucking fuck?” I feel bad because I like Danny Glover as a human being and as a presumed dude who loves to go fishing, but any movie where he plays a wizened old dude who narrates over scenes of dramatic stuff happens is bound to be terrible.

It’s kind of worth seeing, though, just as an example for how badly a movie with presumably talented people behind it. It was directed by the dude who made “The Constant Gardener” which was pretty great, and written by Don McKellar who is one of the best Canadian Dudes around and wrote and directed one of my favourite movies ever. But the film was just so badly put together it hurts to think about.

Put it this way: if other movies ended the way Blindess ends, there’d be no need to ever really think about film. The Godfather would have had ended with Al Pacino narrating over the final scene, saying “And now I have embraced my path in organized crime, and I must shut my new wife out of this world I find myself in”. Boogie Nights would have had Wahlberg thinking aloud, “I am back in this world I tried to leave, for this big penis is all I have.” Kindergarten Cop would have ended with Arnold monologuing about how, through the children, he learned what it means to love again.

It’d be great for blind people, but suck for the rest of it. Wait. Maybe THAT was the point?

Final point: I know I’m late to loving This American Life but I’m diving in head-first anyway. I love this goddamned podcast so much I find myself looking forward to days when I have meetings booked that will require me to drive for an hour or more.

Here’s a little bit from a show that popped up on my iPhone about two weeks ago, during the show where Ira Glass and the gang told 20 short stories in the 60-minute show. This was the last one. It kills me.

More later! I’m in Halifax this week but I will try to think of awesome things to write while I am there.

• Work. It’s a little known fact about me that over the last two years I managed the design and development of EmployerRegistry.ca from a chart paper concept to a fully-featured web database that has so far resulted in over 600 Ontario employers stating or restating their interest in experiential learning programs. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

  It’s still a work in progress, but websites always are. In fact, if you’re a Mac user — like me — don’t try to visit the site until later this week. It’s then that we’ll FINALLY be offering Safari support. The government has very little love for Apple computers.

• My OTHER blog, yworking.com, which still isn’t updated very often but I think has a nice little archive of posts. This past week, I was interviewed by the Editor-in-Chief of IT World Canada on the topic of Facebook (and other social media sites) at work. I also got sent a book to review. These all seem like things that are legitimizing. At this rate, the blog will be successful in roughly forty years. At which point I will be completely out-of-touch.
• Twitter. Twitter is the greatest. I know that still not a lot of people really know what twitter is, and even amongst those that do, not a lot of people understand it at all. But trust me. Twitter is fantastic. It’s inexplicable and it envelopes you slowly, but eventually you will do nothing in your life without first checking twitter. Sign up. Seriously.

  The only downsides? People keep asking why I update my facebook status so much. (I don’t! I never do!) And, also, the 140 character limit makes it impossible for me to really execute my favourite style of humour: the type that involves several long paragraphs and very little pay-off. Unfortunate.

• Christmas. I was going to link to christmas.com, but apparently that’s little more than a domain squatter site. Someone is missing out on making a ton of money selling trinkets and crap through that domain name. You’d really corner the holiday market as it pertains to web users whose browsing style involves thinking about whatever it is they want to see and then typing that in followed by “.com”. And there are a lot of these people.

  In any case, Christmas (the holiday) isn’t really taking up THAT much of my time, as I eschew the more time-consuming customs (Sending out cards, having a tree, baking things, smiling at people, etc.) in favour or kicking back and buying most of my gifts through amazon.ca. (Don’t want a book or a DVD? How about NOTHING? Would NOTHING be an appropriate gift for you?) But still there is something about it being almost Christmas that makes putting serious effort into anything almost counter-productive. Who’s going to take notice of things NOW?

  No. Better to wait until January. 2009. That’s when things stop being polite and start getting real.

• TV and Movies. I’m still a media junkie, though less so than before. Thankfully the Fall Season produced zero new shows that I actually watch, so all I really bother to catch these days is The Office (Still good), 30 Rock (Bad start but getting better), How I Met Your Mother (delightful), Prison Break (Almost literary), Heroes (Terrible) and House (Mostly boring). Plus my secret shames which include ER, The Hills and the nobody-likes-it-but-me Canada’s Worst Driver. I also watched The Shield and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which both had fantastic seasons, but they’re done now.

  As far as movies go, it’s an exciting time for me. As a self-appointed member of The Academy, I expect to see all sorts of Oscar-worthy movies this season. Looking forward to Milk, The Wrestler, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and so many more. This past weekend Erin and I saw Rachel Getting Married which was seriously great, even though more than half of it was little more than people dancing to World Music. Don’t go see that movie if you hate the idea of people dancing to World Music.

That’s about it for now. I’m sure that seems kind of lackadaisical and lackluster (and… lacking?) compared to people who do important things like save lives or fix teeth, but it’s my life and it’s the only one I have. As always, I apologize for everything.

Erin and I watched two movies this weekend. Burn After Reading was a nice reminder that, even after the Coen Bros win an Oscar and direct a movie that connects with audiences, they’re still incredibly dark filmmakers with little-to-no inclination towards crowd-pleasing. Burn was pretty typical, and likely would have gone over better if it hadn’t come on the heels of No Country and had a red-band trailer that pretty much contained all of the straightforward “funny”. The rest is just bureaucracy and people getting murdered.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno was probably better than Kevin Smith’s last two movies, but nowhere near a triumph or anything. The first twenty minutes are actually pretty solid — right up to the high school reunion scene — but then it descends into dullness as soon as the titular porno comes into play. Plots always seem to ruin Kevin Smith movies.

Also, and this is standard with Smith flicks, but the Mary Sue self-insertion in the script was ridiculously over-the-top. Overweight bearded slacker dude wins over attractive woman with his magic penis? Come on.

I’m in full-on winter hibernation mode these days, as nothing about going out on weekends really appeals to me at the moment. It’s cold and it gets dark before five o’clock. That’s bullshit and I won’t even tacitly support it. My protest will be in the form of staying at home and watching movies.

I started playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on my new iMac. I played through the original and Vice City, but never got around to this one. It’s all right, though kind of a bit too much like The Sims with drive-by shootings. I have to go to the gym, visit my girlfriend, eat food and buy clothes? Jesus Christ. It’s hard out here for a pimp.

This week: a hopefully quieter week at work. Oh, and we’ll probably have a new Prime Minister tomorrow. How cool is THAT? The rest of the world will be so confused as we’ll magically have a new leader without so much as an election. Parliamentary democracy is the best.

More later!

That’s all fake stuff I just made up. I’m sorry about that. I don’t even know why I did it. There’s no reason to lie about the historical importance of Windsor, especially considering its the birthplace of both the dude who played Wheels on Degrassi and CanCon Rock legends The Tea Party, veterans of Big Shiny Tuneses 2, 4, 6 and 9.

BRIEF ASIDE: I just looked at the tracklists for the Big Shiny Tunes series and it’s amazing how much better the first volume is than every single one that followed it. Aside from the possible exception of “Scooby Snacks”, it all holds up.

So Windsor will take up the brunt of my week. Other things on the docket include a 5:45 a.m. wake-up call on Tuesday, to head to an event in which I must wear a suit, which I hardly ever do. Later in the week things calm down, and I am likely to take some to sit around in the city in public spaces like coffee shops and mall food courts looking introspective, hoping that someone will ask me to pose for an oil painting.

It’s all been good times since I last wrote, guys. I got my computer and it’s pretty fantastic. I am typing on it right now. The screen is so bright and clear and gorgeous that I imagine this is probably pretty much exactly what Jodie Foster saw when she got blasted into space in that one movie she was in. (It was Nell.) They should have sent a poem, is what I’m saying. Instead they sent me.

Big plans for life as a 25 year old are still developing. Mostly they include writing disjointed blog points where paragraphs start out serious but then devolve into bizarre medleys of non-sequiturs and half-jokes. All dosed with healthy detachment.

Also: Need to book a dentist appointment. And call the cable company to see if they will give me a free HD box. And continue organizing things in this file cabinet I bought. And start exercising more. And discover the terrible beauty of truth in our times.

One step at a time.

ASIDE: Posting about your cats on the internet is LAME. It’s borderline stupid. It’s just so goddamned cliché. It’s like posting about how much you hate your parents or why you’re a giant atheist. It’s not that you probably don’t have good reasons or intentions, but just that there is very little chance anyone will actually care. This also applies to poetry.

So, these cats. One is a male cat named Sebastian. The other is a girl cat named Viola. They are both black with white faces and paws. Initially they looked identical. Now, Sebastian is like twice the size of Viola so they’re more distinguishable.

ASIDE: I just described the cats instead of posting a picture because, again, people who post pictures of their cats are going down a bad road. It’s like posting a picture of your desktop wallpaper or, worse, a picture of a sunset you ran through a bunch of photoshop filters. All of these things are needless and uninspired.

Viola does the craziest thing. Normally she’s nowhere near as sociable as her brother, but sometimes she just demands attention. And it’s to the point where it’s impossible to deny her, because she will sit on your head if she has to. She will not take no for an answer.

ASIDE: Oh god, what am I doing here? I’m posting about my cats. I’m seriously doing that. I’m posting about my cats and the cute things that they do. That I’m self-aware is no excuse. That’s like being a criminal who is entirely aware of the immorality of his actions. I’m a murderer who is stabbing a guy in the neck, knowing fully well that the man I am stabbing is a perfectly nice man, who also sponsors a child in Africa. There is no excuse for that. None.

So she does this thing, where I will be petting her with one hand and she will be purring and looking happy. But then she’ll start eyeing my other hand with suspicion. Suspicion quickly turns to disdain. “Why aren’t you petting me too?” I imagine her saying, as if cats could talk.

ASIDE: Seriously. The dude gave up a cup of coffee a day to sponsor a starving child and what am I doing? I am stabbing him. In the neck. I’m pathetic. A waste of time and space. Cats! Really.

I’m thinking she doesn’t understand that my hands are actually two parts of a whole. Instead, she sees them as independent beings, both of which are responsible for lavishing upon her indiscriminate attention whenever she determines it necessary.

ASIDE: I’m not even sure where I’m going with this. What’s the goal here? To get people to laugh? To make them say ‘aww’? To amuse and delight? With my stories of cat ownership? What is this? Cat Fancy Magazine? What am I, a sell-out? A sixty-five-year-old woman? A murderer of noble men? I don’t know.

I guess it’s true what they say: you think you’ll just be owning cats, but they end up owning you.

ASIDE: Seriously. Fucking Cat Fucking Fancy Fucking Maga- Fucking -Zine. Fuck.