Archives for May, 2006

And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.
from Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

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I’d emailed my resume yesterday to a company looking for a web designer and received this inexplicable reply this morning:

Last one – very fresh look – may be too fresh

That email was quickly followed up with:

Sorry Fathima I was trying to pass some responses to my boss and you were the last. I’ll get back to you with a proper response soon.

What does that even mean, too fresh?

If he does get back to me, it’ll be because he feels guilty, but I suspect he won’t.
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My neighbour tosses The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck to me, half unread. When pressed for a reason as to why she didn’t like it, she says she found it boring. And “The rabbit book [i.e. The Tale of Peter Rabbit] was longer.”
“Longer?” I reply. “No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was,” she insists. “It was 64 pages long.” She flips through Jemima. “This is 57.”
These books are smaller than my hands and every other page is a picture.

Asked why she read Peter Rabbit (it was my copy), she explains she had heard about it somewhere.

My neighbour is 7 year old and small enough that when she picks up The Norton Shakespeare, she falls over. This book is over 3400 pages long and has tissue-thin paper. Continue reading this entry »

Maybe this is a defence mechanism.

But it is the summer and I am still so busy that it feels like there isn’t enough time to breathe – and yet I’m still house-bound.

run.ltw is going to sleep for a while, but oh well.

In grade nine I was many things: the British girl, the new girl, the girl with the largest glasses in the entire school.

Alright, so the last I can’t actually verify, but looking at old pictures of me (of which there are thankfully few), I find it hard to believe that anyone could have ever had larger glasses, ever.
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