Announcing the Know-It-All After Show quiz league

Starting off the new year with a big pub quiz announcement! Tonight we begin an NDG quiz league! Winners of the league get a keg party at Ye Olde Orchard pub NDG courtesey of Beau's. Draft a team and accumulate points each week. Be there every Monday at 9pm, compete for nightly prizes and gain points in the league. Get there early, tables fill up fast. Quiz on folks! 

Took myself on my dream honeymoon to Turkey and Greece. This is the village of Oia, in Santorini.


What is it about a place that makes you want so badly to capture a photo of it? It isn’t the beauty of it, it’s the feeling you get when you’ve seen it that you want to keep. The feeling you get that there is untold magic left yet to discover. Not much time, and so much to see.

Dating in a post He's-Just-Not-That-Into-You world

Damn girl-

That whole online dating thing is harder than it looks. How does a nice, awesome lady like yourself sift through the piles of messages from creepers in your inbox? Here's how I've managed to spot the douchebag in the mess of inbox princes in 4 easy steps:

1. His profile pic is a disembodied torso. Optional toolbag pics include closeups of a car or their tribal tattoo.

Douchebags like to let the spray tan do the talking and what that tan is telling you is that he can't wait to totally forget to call you. It also says "Hey girl, I'm as worried about your orgasm as I am about skin cancer." Do yourself a favor and make the distinction that if the dude is headless, that's a dealbreaker.


2. Tools tend to message you with an utter lack of words. The following are actual messages I've received:

;)

 'sup

 heyy shawty

Gurl hollaback

Heyy hw R u?

8/10
 you look like u have hot boob. lol


Some of them are budding examples of attempts at the written word but illiteracy derailed them before they could hatch into fully formed coherent statements like "I'd love to hear back from you" or "You seem nice." Guys who refuse to use written language to communicate with you in a forum based on the written word lead me to believe they will not, in general, turn out to be a good communicators.

3. Douchebags of a feather flock together.

Is that a group shot of guys doing body shots off a girl on a pool table? #winning!
Are his friends total nobs? Chances are he is too. Humans surround themselves with people who share their values. Don't want to date a guy who uses a skateboard as his main mode of transport to head over and borrow twenty bucks from his mom? Check out his friends. Are they on skateboards? Do they think the cast of Jersey Shore make for good role models? If your interests include having no idea what Jersey Shore is, there's a good chance he isn't the prince charming you've been looking for.


4. He sends you a pic of his "package"

Nothing says "you are an object to me" like a close-up of some junk. A dude that represents himself by sending a total stranger a picture of his man-branch is trying to tell you something very important about the fundamental contents of his soul: he's a prick.


Do yourself, and women everywhere, a favor and don't hit reply unless it's to tell him that his message is a waste of bandwidth and he should get back to reading that chapter on 'negging' in The Game. Demand more and maybe he'll realize that these profiles he's sifting through to trawl for action belong to actual lady humans.

seek, play, love

After two weeks in Uganda

I straddle a line between despair and joy. I’ve come to see that this is the balance that life is always trying to strike, not too far on either side.  I like it here, in Gulu, in the village with the gray blue sunsets and the jungle green all around. I find peace as I step sometimes toward despair, sometimes toward joy. But I feel peaceful because here I’ve come close to doing what I was meant to do. Life should always be this lovely adventure. Today I saw so many things, things it would take a year to see back home. A young boy who told me he was missing school because he had to go into town to get his HIV medication.  I finally made tragic Joseph crack a smile on the swing set. I held a sleeping baby.  I pumped the well so the young girls could fill their jerrycans. I went with three twelve year old girls on a walk to the garden to harvest the bwo for dinner.

On the walk I met a goat. A chicken. A baby pig, I fed a sheep as she lay in the shade. I walked in the mud and picked handfuls of bwo. I washed my feet in a pool of rainwater. I walked through sweet potato fields, beneath a mango tree, banana tree, lime tree and guava tree. I walked until my feet were stained rusty red as the soil of Bar Dege. I learned to say ‘I love you’ in Acholi Lwo. And back at the orphanage as we sat and cleaned and sorted the leaves into bowls one of the house “mothers” came along and said: “Ah munu, you are learning”

Indeed.

Found Poem

2012 is the year I plan on meeting an elephant, with that on my brain I've been using found poetry in my workshops with teen moms and here's my latest found poem. Great activity to spark something when I have writer's block. 

Elephant

Extant of the family,

their daily routine

others prepare for something malevolent.

Perhaps the most extraordinary

information repository

split between beauty and integrity,

the sophisticated lobby of black and white

the solo artist

voices of elephants louder than armor,

elephant man, elephant in the room

our home, the herd.

The world over is exhibited and captive

Tis the season for shortlists: http://www.kobzarliteraryaward.com/ and it's pretty terrific to be included as part of this Ukrainian-Canadian dialogue. I'm looking forward to reading the other books on this shortlist, I have a feeling I'm in good company here.

Erasure Poems

How much fun is it to erase? To create a poem by slowly cutting away at the text? This website offers an interactive page that allows poems to emerge with the click of a mouse: http://www.wavepoetry.com/erasures/

At my workshop this week we used Shakespeare's sonnets, a great source text because there is a poem between every line, every word.

Result; erasure from sonnet 90

Then hate me. now

while the world is bent.

do not come in

not a windy night, a rainy morrow

leave me. petty griefs.

the very worst

of might. of woe