The Vancouver trip is looking more and more settled - I'm planning it for April 11th - 14th. After doing some research about East Vancouver and the state of the Main and Hastings area, I've booked a room in a hostel in West Vancouver. There were three HI hostels to choose from. I picked the one that doesn't apparently vibrate with the music in the neighboring clubs. It's close to transit, anyway.

I picked up a digital recorder at Future Shop yesterday, as well as a new air mattress. I got rid of the bedframe because I think it was causing the punctures, so now I'm sleeping on the floor, but at least I'm not waking up bent backwards over a bar.

I'm hitting campus today to start researching my Race and Cinema essay and hopefully to get some other reading done. Yesterday I read Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems and John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath for Avant-Garde. This weekend I'll be looking at Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies for the first time since high school, along with Salih's Season of Migration to the North, if I can find it. Thank goodness the Tragedy responses are staving off for a couple of weeks.

Andrea is visiting soon. We're going to see The Raveonettes. I just downloaded their new record and it's good stuff if a bit repetitive.

Fucking bullshit piece of crap mattress. My back is killing me. Like the first mattress that deflated I can't find a puncture in this one, so I guess this means I'll have to buy a new one. And I'll have to do it before I'm no longer able to walk.

Blah blah class, blah blah Jazz Singer, blah blah aching back.

If the stabbing pain in my back is any indication, it looks as though I've punctured another air mattress. Vying for space in the still-inflated portions of a surface is not the most comfortable way to start a day. The worst part is that I won't have time to fix it/buy a new one today. I'm pondering sleeping on the floor.

My laptop is back online. I'm thinking seriously about picking up a desktop iMac. Nice ones come fairly cheap and are usually accompanied by glowing reviews of their performance. I think Kat has one so I'm going to ask her what she thinks.

My mom was going through x-rays of her shoulder injury for her hearing (which is today) and noticed one that indicated a spot on her lung. She had new ones taken a few days ago and got the results back yesterday - negative, thankfully. It was just an area of scarring from a previous bout of pneumonia.

The snow is really coming down outside. Welcome to December. I picked up Christmas present number one today, for Andrea. My only concern is getting it overseas without damaging it.

The Opera gang and I rehearsed today. The evidence:



I think we're more or less ready for Monday. It should be pretty funny. Unfortunately, I won't really get to SEE it, because I'm in it.

After the rehearsal I caught Before the Devil Knows You're Dead at the Varsity. The flick starts out promising but lost me in its efforts around the halfway point before its unsatisfying conclusion. No one in the film is all that likable, which would be fine if they were at least vile in a compelling way, but they aren't. Besides that, it's really the kind of thriller that's been done before both structurally and thematically, without leaving even a hint of why it should exist in the first place. I've seen a couple of Lumet's Pacino movies, which I liked, but this one felt too dreary, too obvious and too driven by its form.

When I woke up this morning my air mattress had deflated, but I couldn't find any punctures. I tried re-inflating it but it wouldn't work, so I broke out my other air mattress and filled it. Then I figured out what I was doing wrong with the other mattress, so now I have the two mattress piled on top of each other. It's double the bed. I don't know why I didn't think of doing this before.

I ate dinner, watched Dogma and uploaded some pictures. Tomorrow I have to really get a crack at that design for my Touch of Evil presentation.