it happens every so often that i entirely lose the capacity for budgeting my time. time blurs and loses meaning, save acting as a temporal landmark for having to either i) wake up, or ii) race to wherever i'm supposed to be next. i'm late a lot. and for a short while that bothers me, and i make the concerted effort to be on time. but after a while, when some trace of exhaustion sets in, that drive disappears, leaving a "fuck the consequences" mentality in its place. which is actually kind of fun. it's like realizing you hate your job, and secretly hoping you get fired. (or if you work at the derrick with brim, you actually do try to get fired. ah, memories...) of course, i can't justifiably complain at all, since i bring it upon myself. i usually end up getting sick at some point from lack of sleep and malnourishment, but the silver lining there is that i get to take the day or two off that i should have taken anyway. i'd say "ah, hindsight is 20/20", but when you don't learn from the experience it's a rather trite statement to make.

point being? it's been nuts for weeks. but highlights have been many, so i'll recap some for those interested.

shows: lyrics born in calgary. road trips are great. the show was hot like "ouch". they showed the girl skateboard video "yeah, right!" while the opening dj rocked the shit out of the dancefloor. in fact, i danced almost all night, which says something about the dj. hot damn, i say. dragon fli empire opened, and were really impressive. lyrics born was great. fun times. only bad thing? speakers so loud that it made me dizzy at points. i kid you not.. a painful lesson in why not forget earplugs at hip-hop shows. k-os at the starlite room. good show. all live instrumentation, which was a first experience for me at a hip-hop show. his cover of gza's 'liquid swords' was a surprise, and well done at that. here's a hint for guys that are 7 feet tall, though: don't stand in the middle of the crowd. people can't see over you. unless they're taller than you, in which case they shouldn't be standing in the middle of the crowd either. hayden at the myer horowitz. for me, the show of the month. i suppose being a huge fan has a lot to do with it, but he just keeps getting better and better. and funnier, too.. the opening band, cuff the duke, were a surprise as well. an all around great show, if you're fan. oh, and there was this crazy girl in the aisle who wouldn't stop interpretive dancing throughout. she's like a walking psa for reasons not to do drugs. like whoa. when she makes you feel embarrassed, you know it's a bad scene.

films: not a film per se, but monkmus gave a talk at the international film festival. for those who don't know, he's an animator who's done videos for kid koala, badly drawn boy, sesame street, and who's worked on countless tv shows, including the pj's. the talk was good, and seeing his work on the garneau's somewhat big screen was cool, too. last weekend i saw i heart huckabees. and loved it! at some point i realized that jigga and i were the only two people in the theatre actually laughing out loud, but not everybody can be as bitter/confused/boring as the rest of the movie-goers there. if you're smart, and you have a sense of humour, it's a great movie. if not, then i won't make any promises. the characters are great, and the movie is pretty thought-provoking, while being pretty hilarious, too. i'd make a bunch of inside jokes, but it's a shame to have them fall on deaf ears, or in this case blind eyes.

as you all know, it snowed. as expected, we jibbed. as usual, we got kicked out. as promised, there are pictures.

track facts: nobody is throwing up at track any more, but running all-out 100m's a whole bunch of times in an hour is way harder than it looks on paper. 42" hurdles are high. tire pulls aren't easy. what's worse than hot-cold-hot-cold showers? an ice-bath. i look funny in a headband and tights. but funny in a good way. what?

sorry, i'll write when i have something thoughtful to say.

give yourself a hug, especially if it's been that kind of week.
jh..

"I don't appreciate your David Copperfield trickery!"

it had to be quoted somewhere. that man lets fly with some of the best, ought-to-be-embarrassing-but-just-isn't-aware-of-what-he-says one-liners.

it's one of the best feelings in the world, being with best old friends, even somewhere you wouldn't normally enjoy being, and having it be just the same as it always was. i've always said it, and i'll say it again now; that's one of the things that make best friends best friends. time with them is timeless. (paradox duly noted, and casually dismissed.)

here's to high-fived called-out stink-eyes, giant sheepskin coats, Crazy Bill stories, David Copperfield trickery, and everything else that has already been and is still yet to be.

g, i miss you. tonight reminded me how much.

all the best to all my best.
jh..

growing pains.

psychologists propose that annual-seasonal prompts are, collectively, enough stimulus to recall and reinstill feelings and event-related sentiments from years past. what's interesting is having something life-altering happen one year, and as a result not feeling the customary year-to-year feelings at the same time any more. even if it's a good thing to have lost that annual sentiment, it's still strange. it's true that for the most part we're creatures of habit. in habit we find comfort. routine, on some level, gives most of us a sense of underlying security. it's hard to leave a part of you behind, even if it is a reliably annual sentiment that isn't entirely good. Peck wrote that growth hurts, precisely because in growing personally, we're most often leaving something behind. that something can be a mannerism, a belief, a job, a lover, a way of life, almost anything. and he's right. it's comfortable to stay where we are. to stay as we are. it can be terrifying to grow, especially when it means moving into the unknown, even when we know it's for the better. but then life isn't much fun if you don't change, even if that does mean leaving some things behind. some people. some of yourself. there is always more. infinite or not, it's enough to fill up a lifetime.

growing hurts in other ways, too. when you haven't done any physical training in years and decide to start again, it hurts. my god, does it hurt. i hadn't thrown up during a workout in my lifetime before friday. i've since learned that when your body has a toxic amount of lactic acid in it (notably from doing eleven rounds of plyometrics up forty stairs and then repeatedly sprinting up flights of a hundred fifty odd stairs), it's sort of out of your hands. more aptly put it's out of your mouth and onto your hands. but when everyone else - literally every single person - in your training group experiences the exact same thing at virtually the exact same time, you don't feel too badly about the shape you're in. it's actually kind of funny. it's actually kind of great.

it's another unique thing to grow and to change, and to come full circle with things and to have the old become new again. it surprises how different things can be the second time around. sometimes it's worse, and you move on again, for the second time. perhaps the last time. perhaps the second "last time." and sometimes it's better in ways you didn't think it could be. so you stick around and see where it takes you. maybe you're ready for it now. maybe it's changed to fit your person better. maybe you've changed so that you fit with it. maybe nothing seems to have changed, but the time and place are right, and it's meant to be.

maybe you knew it all along, but things had to go a certain way so that everything would turn out right in the end.

big ups to kirk cameron. peace and love to the rest.
jh..

europe2004.1a

I totally forgot (see what happens when you leave things for four and a half months?) one of the the funniest things from Barcelona. On Las Ramblas, after checking my e-mail and eating something not particularly healthy or tasty or ethnic, I saw the craziest, cracked-out, thirty-something Spanish prostitute, big old Spanish boobs completely hanging out of her shirt, screaming and laughing and dry-humping some terrified-looking tourist from behind through a set of scaffolding. I kid you not. I almost cried I was laughing so hard. Hell, I was by myself and I was still laughing that hard. If I was quicker I'd have gotten a picture, but alas, not so lucky. I wish I could recreate the look on that poor guy's face. Priceless.

Just thought you all would like to know.

europe2004.1

so here it is. the long, long overdue update on the trip. just pretend i'm still there...


wow. i left off a hell of a long time ago. like months ago. like a few weeks into my 3 month long trip. i'm ashamed... what? haha! let's not kid ourselves.. i'm not ashamed at all. I WAS IN EUROPE! i was lazy. i was having fun. i was sleeping in and spending 4 pounds sterling an hour just to check my e-mail and make flight reservations. i was...

...in Nice the last time many of you heard from me. I didn't stay for much longer before I caught the SNCF train along the beautiful Cote D'Azur to Montpellier where I transferred to a bus for the long ride to Barcelona. It's not the cleanest city, certainly not the safest city, but it's somewhere worth visiting, surely. I met up with my good friend Tori and her fiancee shortly after arriving, and the fun began. Las Ramblas is the giant pedestrian boulevard running south from Placa Catalunya all the way to the beaches along the Mediterranean coastline. The street is a sight in itself, with more kiosks, stores, markets, street performers, and sadly, beggars, than you could shake a truck of sticks at. The atmosphere is amazing though, both day and night. The Ramblas (each block of the strip is a Rambla of unique name) is full of people shopping, walking, drinking, eating, and whatever else, all day and through most of the night. Even the blocks off of the main strip are packed! Think of the craziness of the Fringe in Edmonton, but running the entire length of Whyte Ave, and running pretty much continuously, and you have Las Ramblas c. 2004. It's a sight. The city is, of course, also famed for its various displays of architecture, most notably those of the highly revered Antoni Gaudi. The Sagrada Familia is an ornate, massive sight to behold, both the old side and new. Seeing it at night is an experience in itself. The beaches are lovely to lay on, even when the May water is still too cold for even three seasoned Candians to swim in. Thanks mostly to Tori and Gord, Barcelona was a memorable, and great stop on the way to...

...Paris. It was a bit of a hike from Barcelona (that involved a 5 hour delay in the bus ride due to the complete collapse into the valley of more than half of the highway leading east from the city), but the effort is always worth it when you're going to meet someone special. So after arriving late late late to Paris, and literally running for 20 minutes with a full 65L backpack on the back and a smaller but heavier-thanks-to-the-books-that-I-bought-to-entertain-myself pack on the front, I arrived just in time to claim the seemingly last available hostel bed in Paris. Lesson? Don't arrive late to Paris with no hostel bed. The day to follow was nothing short of a marathon-magnitude on-foot sightseeing tour of the Seine sights in the capital of France with the two guys from Vancouver I happened to bunk with. The day included such unplanned but great things such as attending Sunday Mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral, doing a near-complete and entirely-tiring tour of the Louvre (yes, including the big ones like the Venus di Milo, Winged Victory, and Mona Lisa), Les Jardins Tuileries, walking Les Champs-Elysees, seeing the Eiffel Tower, and having a turnstile-jumping contest in many of Paris' Metro stations. Eventually we got trapped in one of the bigger Metro/SNCF stations, but luckily our schoolboy faces and Canadian charm were enough to sweet-talk the young French girl at the wicket into letting us through without a fine. Who knew that boys can bat eyelashes to effect, too? She ate it up. After resting for a short bit around dinner-time, the Canadian crew plus naive American college girl headed out to the rather unexpected, and entirely crazy nightlife of the area around the easternmost Bastille monument. If you think that Whyte Ave is a crazy strip of bars and clubs, then this would be a mindblower. There were entire blocks made up of literally nothing else. It was kind of riduculous, really. But amusing? How could it not be.. And apparently I really do look like a hippie. I hadn't been offered drugs as many times before in my lifele alone in a single night. Oh, those crazy Francais.. So after a few hours of sleep and a long metro ride from the city, I arrived at the Charles de Gaulle airport to meet the lady friend. And to think that we only had to wait for a couple of hours for a bus that was slated to come but never arrived before we managed to somehow get a free ride to the nearby town of Gonesse from a busdriver that not only went way way off his route to get us there, but made a half dozen tired and otherwise cranky French women wait the 20 minutes there, and back, to do so. After a night at the Hotel FastHome (wow, well done with the naming Gonesse), we were off again, to...

...Nice. This is a runing theme in my trip, really. Returning to the same place at least a few different times throughout. But let me tell you, Nice with a pretty girl is about a hundred times better than Nice by yourself. Hell, maybe a thousand. I'm willing to risk your disbelief to make my point. So the first hotel graced with our collective presence happened to be located in some strangely yet unidentifiably ethnic area of the city. Complete with a streetfront room with a large window opening into the night. A night fittingly filled with the cat-in-heat abrasiveness of a young french woman screaming at the top of her lungs, smashing bottles on streets and cars, and challenging passers-by to fights. It was entertaining to say the least. And the sad thing? We got used to it. I can only imagine what living in the Bronx must do to a person's tolerance for noise. The next hotel was much quieter, though, and our days were filled with lying on Nice's pebbled beaches (still not comfortable the second time around), walking the streets, shopping at Monoprix (best grocery store in the damn world. Come on, they play Joao Gilberto on the loudspeaker for you to buy vegetables and Mortadella to. And this little Monoprix jingle that they play there? So great. We were singing it for days on end.), eating ice cream, and enjoying the Cote d'Azur. And the beach in Monaco? Wow. Only in Monaco would they spend money to have someone CONTINUALLY cleaning the super-fine pebbled beach, and intermittently skiming the Mediterranean with a net-pulling Sea-Doo. Fan-frigging-tastic. Only made better by the fact that I got to walk half of the F1 racecourse on foot and eat cherries in the sun. But the time in Nice had to come to an end, and when it did, it was clearly time for...

...and overnight layover in the Schonefeld Airport, Berlin. And the best part about flying to Germany from Nice? The German word for Nice is Nizza. Hells yeah! Couldn't have asked for a more 'BET's Rap City: Tha Bassment' translation than that. Not that the name itself made the prospect of a layover fun. But when you know that a horrible night might be on the horizon, and you make a pact to have fun with it, it's amazing how great it can end up being. Having a veritable deli in your backpack with all the makings of the world's best sandwiches helps things along nicely, too. And again, being with a pretty girl who makes you laugh makes things run smoother than tanning oil on old golden French grandpas on the beach in Nice. (Just to clarify, that's f'ing smooth.) The only downside is having to listen to beaking of the tight-pants-wearing communist-haircut (no offence Blaj, you know I have nothing against Communism) Russian guys across the way in the despite-the-russians-still-quietest part of the airport. But after a few hours that passes, too, and you're off to...(be continued...)

everything old is new again..

not quite everything under the sun, but enough that it's apparent lately.

for those that remember it, which is probably most, i downloaded nirvana's 'in utero' last night. i hadn't listened to it since some time in junior high, which puts it at least 9 years in my past. but damn if it isn't a great album. for what it is - angry anthems for a bored and confused generation of self-medicating adolescents and twenty-somethings - it's brilliant. simple in most respects, but then what about their music wasn't? it's raw, and filled with emotion. maybe it's because it was a throw-back for me to hear it again, but i think i like the album as much now as i did then. maybe even moreso because now i can appreciate it for what it is.

also for those that remember, which in this case will amount to about a half dozen, i ran track for two intermittent periods during grade 12 and the summer after first year. it was something i stopped doing because of team politics and the pressures of university. as such it was a decision that i always regretted having to make, and wasn't ever happy settling with. so i'm picking it up again now. qualifying was wednesday, so i'm waiting for the verdict to come back this week. at the very least, it was a great feeling to have my spikes on again, flying down the track, feet pounding in a frequency and intensity that for me aren't matched anywhere else. i'd forgotten it almost entirely, having not run like that for so many years, but the wind truly roars in your ears when you get going fast enough. it's kind of amazing, the juxtaposition... so loud. so peaceful.

i haven't had many real first dates in my life. 4 to be exact. but i can safely say that they've all been nothing short of lovely. and i think i like it that way; a perfect example of quality over quantity. there's something special about being nervous in that way. the planning of what to wear, where to go, how to act, what to say...and then having it all go differently. and not caring because in the end none of that really matters when you're with the right person. it seems that you can't actually plan things to go as well as they turn out anyway. the surprise, especially when pleasantly unexpected, is what makes some things so unique. and memorable.

the feeling that things are falling into place is an old one, too. and of course it's never a feeling that can last forever, because life just isn't like that. things don't ever permanently fall into place. there isn't a point past which life is smooth sailing. i'm learning that now. fully realizing it. and maybe to most it's something innate, but i've been looking for that in life for a long time. it's sort of calming to realize that it's elusive because it doesn't actaully exist. it takes a lot of self-applied pressure off, knowing that things will never be perfect. it's like a free license to not worry about what happens in life. and that's not to say that striving to be the best you can be is futile, quite the opposite as far as i see it. growing, learning, loving, taking care of the people around you, your body, and your mind - to me anyhow - are some of the most rewarding things in life. it's doing them without expectation of perfection that makes them even better. and in the end it makes them more prolific.

it used to be that when i thought of things falling into place i'd associate it with assuming that life was reaching a point whereafter everything would really be smooth and easy. now i'm realizing that when things fall into place for me, more than anything it signals a time for learning, for growth. it's the falling into place that gives me the time to learn what i need to learn to get through the next time when the world seems like it's falling apart. and even if things don't fall into place, maybe that's not what matters i the end. maybe what really matters is having the feeling in the first place. that's what drives me to go somewhere new with my life, my self. the feeling, not the fact.

it feels like things are falling into place..

peace. love.
jh..

"it's been 23 years, son, and sometimes i feel as stuck as ever, though i'm better when the weather gets stormy now..because my elder half has taught me some ill shit, and showed me how when times are lookin' rough to straight flip it.."