Once you leave home, you can never go back...well you can, you just have to be half in the bag.

Happy belated E-weekend (Easter weekend)!  

Happy belated E-day (Earth Day)! 

And Happy almost E-day (Election day)!

This past weekend I decided to take a trip to my hometown Winnipeg, Manitoba. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I LOVE flying. (Is it because of the feeling of freedom you get from flying above the world for a few hours? Maybe.  Is it the idea of however much you drink before and during your flight being amplified ten-fold and you being able to get away with anything because (similarly to the idea of “international- water”) you are in international water-air?  YES.  YES IT IS.)  So in keeping with the theme of the weekend (the theme being drinking wine and going mental...) I am writing this blog on the airplane while drinking some lovely red table wine.  Let’s see how this goes...

Glass number 1:

Going home for me is always the best gong-show of my life.  Somehow it seems that because I am only home for a short period of time I end up seeing my family at their craziest (which is an almost deadly amount for most, not for me though!).  There will be wine, food, laughs, gross jokes, awkward moments (this usually follows the wine...) where family secrets get exposed (my cousin has a baby?!?  HA!  YEAH!  SECRETS!)

This time was no different.  I told members of my extended family all of the hilarious attempts my mom has made to get me to “find a man who can support you and your crazy artistic ways” ... I shall only give one example, and it was the introduction to my life with my mother:

I was 16.  My mother asked me to go with her to a social (don’t know what a social is?  If you don’t, YOU HAVEN’T LIVED.  Also, it is just a big party at a community hall where people drink and eat chips and dance and bid on silent auction prizes an drink and drink.  And usually the money made from that goes towards a wedding or something lame)

Glass number 2:

Shall we get this out of the way now?  When I was 16, I looked an awful lot like a soccer mom (more so than I do now, if you can believe that).  I didn’t have a heck-load of friends, and I LOVED school.  I was a complete loser, some would say (“Look at me now” Is what I would scream to them, then I would hold up a picture of my cats and wipe the tears from my face)

At this social was a bunch of my mother’s co-workers.  And I had a few drinks (I won’t lie, I started early with my love for wine.  AND LOOK WHERE I AM NOW!)  And I was a dancing FREAK.  People must’ve thought that my mom’s best friend (ie. ME) was just a partying superfreak.  And I was.  Then the slow song came on (I’ll never forget it, The Beatles “Let It Be”) and a lovely man asked me to dance.  

WHAT?!?

Here I am, the girl who is 16 years old, never kissed a boy, a girl who was certain she would marry a wrestler from the WWF (Rowdy Roddy Piper or Brett Hart to be exact) about to dance with a grown man.  

THIS IS MY ONE SHOT AT LOVE.  DON’T BLOW IT, WALKER.

So I dance with this guy, and after that song is done is THE LAST SONG OF THE NIGHT.

WHAT?!?

Glass numbwr 3:: 

(IT’s getting hardder to type.  With the planes, and the drinks.  Just saying...)

What happens after this song is over? (The song, by the way was Journey’s “Open Arms”.  A classic love song.) As the song ended, the lovely man says to me,

“I’d love to see you again; could I ask you on a date?”

And to which I reply, “You’d have to ask my mom” 

As I point to my mother, standing proudly, watching her daughter “fall in love”.

That lovely man had all the colour drain from his face.

He was so close to statutorily dating me it was scary.  

Later did I realize that my mother told him he should ask me to dance, without adding I was (a) her daughter or (b) a minor.  Neither of this fazed good ol’ mommy.  THIS is just one awesome example of the stories weshare at in opportune times with my famil.y.  

Neddleless to say, it was a fun time.

Glass numbe r4: 

...

Glass n 5:

Sorrry bout htat.. I was looking out the wind ow that last glass.  I wish I could tell time by glas;ses of wines.  “It’s four glasses of wines passt noon”  That is now my official my catchhgphrase.  

I thmnk I ned a a nap.

I reaslly lorve you guysm.  Yous know that, right?!

Whrees’ the baarf bag?  Jusst incase..

I hsould go now.  Did I mention I loves you gutys? 

Sincerely from 3000000000 fett up in the aiir (sr somethings like that) ,

Someonw who should not be drunk flying/bloggin./living// 

I am just going to keep typing so that the weird guy next to me thinks I am busy and stops staring at me...

But I cannot help but glance his way every few seconds.  Is he dead? (no...I can see his chest heaving under his double-breasted suit jacket)  Is he blind? (no... he is holding "No Exit"by Satre...).  Well that narrows it down... he doesn't have a chaperone, so he mustn't be harmful.  Yet. 

Why am I writing this?

Because if I go missing tonight and end up cut up into small bite-size chunks while some lunatic wears his brand new "Lindsey skin-suit", at least we will all be able to sleep a bit better at night knowing that I saw this coming.  

I have started to make the trek out to my new favourite coffee shop (it's a Starbucks... SURPRISE!  I know, I am so very unoriginal...) every week or so to work on my "career" (which somehow involves me writing in this blog about some young man gawking at me...).  I have decided to trek out into the urban wilderness because I have found that the more time I spend sitting at home at my computer, the more time I spend watching ridiculous videos on youtube ("Cats with thumbs?"  YES PLEASE! "Cats talking to each other"?  OF COURSE!! "How to massage your cat"? WEIRD, BUT OKAY!), drinking copious amounts of wine, and attempting to make my cats have thumbs.  And talk to each other.  But NOT massaging them (What do you take me for, some kind of weirdo?!?)  Do you see me being a huge rock star after doing that on a regular basis? (I guess I do, but my only fans would be my cats and the only songs I would write would consist of me screaming at my fridge until hoarse...) 

So here I am, taking that first step to the first day of the rest of my life.

And he is still staring!  STOP IT!!! 

Sorry. Back to the task at hand...

I have even armed my ADD self with a to-do list while I am at said Starbucks.  1) Drink coffee (check!) 2) Get money to record my album (or should I say FINISH recording my album...) working on that. 3) Drink more coffee (check!) 4) Begin writing my memoirs (you never know when a booking agent will ask for them...) 5) Drink more coffee (check!)  6) Leave, feeling accomplished (check- wait, I didn't get anything done except this friggin blog!)

Maybe the to-do list was a little over-zealous.  

I will just continue to sit and type.  

And try to not let this weirdo peer into my soul.  But my God he is close.

HE IS ALSO READING ABOUT EXISTENTIALISM.  Shit. 

On a side note,  SUMMER IS GOING TO BE HERE AND THAT MEANS I CAN YELL ABOUT IT IN MY BLOG!!!!

And I must admit, like most sane people, I love summer.  

I bet "stare-y McHannibal/Twitchell - wannabe" has the burning hatred for summer that would heat a thousand white-hot suns.  Eek. 

Now I don't love summer just for the dresses, large hats, hot dogs, and stray cats I will find, but also for the blessing that my new day-job provides: 

Being located beside a Fire Station.  

Now, I never fully understood why women had such an unrequited love for firemen (here's a childhood memory... every week my mother would make some sort of baking for the firefighters and we would walk over and give them the baking... my mother always told me it was to thank them for "the service" they provided the community.  Now I fully understand that that "service" was to carry large hoses and smile at my mother when she walked by everyday...) I am now learning how EVERY SINGLE PERSON can be attracted to them.  My new life goal (and now the only thing on my bucket list) is to (I have to get the timing down for this...) but I will run out into the street when they pull their fire engine out to respond to a call and they will hit me with their vehicle.  

Yep, I went there.

Now, I will begin extensive training to make sure I won't die, but I will strive to be unconscious for at least a few minutes and stop breathing so that one of them (they would be the first responders...) would have to give me mouth to mouth.

Yep, I went there too.

Then I'll have amnesia.

And they all can nurse me back to health.  

My life dream.

Now, why am I here at Starbucks again?  Never mind.  I will just pretend to be talking on the phone with my husband the firefighter who is very overprotective and if anyone ever laid a hand on me he would hunt them down and give them a stern talking to because he is a lover not a fighter (I guess I got a bit carried away there for a moment...) so that Dr. Creepshow over there will stop planning to eat my brains with a nice Shiraz (just to spice it up).

I take all of that back.

His mega-hot girlfriend just walked in.  WHAT, AM I NOT GOOD ENOUGH?!?! I WAS PLAYING HARD TO GET! 

Jerk. I bet he is also bad in bed.

Yep.  Sadly, I went there.

Now that I am all worked up, I should grab another coffee, and watch a few more cat videos on youtube.  

Until next time I am hopped up on 4 cups of coffee,

That girl at the Starbucks who isn't doing any work and thinks the guy with the lazy eye is going to kill her. 

A dream is a wish inside of you that is clawing it's way out. Not unlike a fetus.

The other night I had a dream...

   -Wait. 

Now let's just hold up right there.  Before you say to yourself "there we go.  She's going to go all Philosophical and idealistic on us.  I knew this would happen sooner or later.  I am out of here.  And I am going to grab a pizza." , I want to assure you that I WON'T be that person.  BUT I will say that I love dreaming, the idea of dreams, and what they could potentially mean in some way.  But enough of that bull-honk.  Let's get back to my (some would say epic) story.

I'll be honest with you.  It's not the dream itself that was very amazing, or life changing or sobering (literally and metaphorically).  It was what happened the morning after the dream that was life changing (may I also point out that like the loser junior high minded boy I am, writing "morning after" made me think of sex and birth control... I know, it's a stretch, but I take what I can get...) Okay.  Right.  Back to this dream.  There was a stranger who appeared in my dream and sang music from the musical "Little Shop of Horrors" to me (If anyone knows the music from that show, you would be able to see that I am a true romantic at heart...) and I was hooked.  We were in love. 

Then I awoke to my cats wrestling on my bed.  And my dream life consisting of me falling in love with a firefighter (I just added that in, just a touch of back-story on my dream soul-mate) who looked vaguely Italian and had a fondness for singing songs that a giant plant would normally sing turned into the reality of me living the life of a crazy cat lady. 

The plot thickens here, my friends. (some would comment that with a plot that thin, there is nothing thick enough to save it, and to that I say, "touche") As I am sitting at my bookstore schlepper job, I look up and BAM.  Mr. "Firefighter of my dreams" is standing right in front of me, holding a book on travelling to Italy. 

I peed a little in my pants. 

At first I wanted to kiss him and scream in his face "YOU WERE IN MY DREAMS LAST NIGHT.  FROM THIS DAY FORTH, WE SHALL NEVER BE APART.  EVER." But after visions of me going to jail (and for the record, going to jail is on my bucket list), being labeled a stalker (also on my bucket list), and never seeing my cats again (NOT on my bucket list) I decided to play it cool. 

Or in Lindsey-terms, act like a mildly retarded person.

So with my insane wide-eyed toothy grin, I did my best not to break eye contact with him (this was hard to do, because he didn't like looking at me... was this a hint?  I THINK NOT), kept the conversation flowing (with witty remarks like "sure is cold outside" and "I only work here part-time.  I am a struggling artist." I don't know how he could resist me...) and had a slight to-and-fro swaying movement to indicate that I liked to dance (or was it because I still had a bit of a buzz from the night before...I guess I can't drink 2 bottles of wine in one sitting like I used to do...) when I hit him with the big guns.  I commented on how he was going to visit Italy and then I asked if I could join him.  He promptly answered "no." but that kind of "no" that has a slight tinge of disgust in the voice.  Not enough that I could be offended personally, but enough to know where we stood.  (And with my luck it would be at least 150 feet away from him at all times.) He left after that comment.  Never to be seen in my non-dreaming life again.  

Unless I can jimmy his window open while he is sleeping and go rifle his sock drawer.

That's what love is all about, isn't it?

I'll just save you all the time in sending me off countless emails and say yes.

In other news, I think I will quit my job and become a full-time dreamer.  Then my Italian fire-fighter who has a 59-pack of abs, supports my 2-bottles of wine a day drinking necessity,  also works for Doctors without borders and likes to garden will sing  "Feed Me, Seymour" to me as I fall asleep each night and will always be with me.  And he will also be with my 47 cats. 

Now that's a dream we can all believe in.

Until next time I am moderately conscious,

Lindsey "I DID have a dream" Walker

Once upon a time in a dumpster, there lived a Princess who had 36 cats...

On the weekend, I was a princess.

I wore a wedding dress (that I OWN, thank you very much...) to a four-year-old girl's princess themed birthday party and showed up as a real princess.

Surprisingly, I have done weirder gigs.

And as much as I wanted to show up hammered with makeup running from my eyes because of the running-tap-like tears that wouldn't stop weeping about how love doesn't exist and your very own Prince Charming will soon enough leave you for a better version of you, I didn't.  I gave those four-year-olds a show they will never forget.  Nor will I.

Now besides the fact that one teeny child saw that I had grease on the bottom of my dress
(Her: Princess, your dress looks like a car ran over it.
Me: Well, my carriage broke down and Prince Charming had to get more gas and I was on the side of the road and there were TRUCKS.
Her: Oh.
Me:  Well, like other things in a Princess' life, I will hide the ugliness and just show off the beautiful dress.
Her:  That's better.)
And the fact that all of my stories were held together with lies, charm, and the overwhelming fear of dying at the hands of children, I think I pulled off being a princess quite well.

Not that I had any practice as a child myself.

You see, I was what you would call a "obese" child.  "Rotund".  "Chunky".  "Hideously fat".  I never really liked any of the Disney movies growing up because it instilled the idea that the skinny beautiful girls would have horrible lives until their "Prince Charming" came along.  And let's face it:  if those girls are having tough lives before they found true love, what about the crap girls would go through who had to wear ladies size 14 jeans in grade 4?  Well, I guess they are just doomed to a life of flirting with the pizza delivery guy because they hadn't left their house in a week and living with the fear that if they fall down (presumably from becoming winded from going up the stairs) their 7 cats will eventually eat away at their rotting corpse because no body would realize they had died. I had figured that this would be the way my life would go until one fateful day when I met my role model.

Her name was Ursula.

She was a massively obese octopus.

Once I saw the power Ursula had in her 8 tentacles (dude, she TOOK SOME CHICK'S VOICE.  WHO DOES THAT?!?!) I knew that ANYTHING was possible.

So I bought a wedding dress, and played the waiting game.

After the realization occurred that I in fact was not a two-tonne octopus destined for evil (and that "The Little Mermaid" was not in fact a documentary about the life of under-sea royalty...), I set off to make use of my newly found wedding dress the best way I knew how... I made people feel uncomfortable.

One of the gigs I had to do with said dress was to sit in the food court of the West Edmonton Mall and be a part of a scavenger hunt.  People had to find the "devastated bride" which meant (you guessed it) I had to sit there - bawling.  For hours.  The other food court-goers were confused (and I do not blame them) as I sat there crying my eyes out.  I would sometimes grab a pop or some fries, which made it even worse (Food court goer: "Look sweetie, she's eating her pain") but I soldiered on.  I look at this experience as a real-life foreshadowing of the life that I will lead, and if that's the case, BRING IT ON. 

If there are any teeny girls reading this blog who want to become princesses when they grow old, I hope you see how the fall from Princess to Random girl bawling in a wedding dress in a food court eating KFC is a slippery slope.

But it sure is a fun one!

Until my prince wakes me up from this rohipnol-induced dream with a creepy kiss,

Princess Ursula

All work and no play make "The Shining" a movie I may never see.

As I look out my window this afternoon, I see nothing but piles of snow, and violent shards of ice flying down towards the ground at high speeds, I can start to understand how Jack Torrance brutally murdered his wife and son in the movie "The Shining" (here's a great piece of trivia for you about me: I NEVER WATCH MOVIES.  But I usually have a good inkling about what the premise of the movie is.  Let's see now... "The Shining"....  This movie is about a family who lives in Canada during the winter and the husband ends up becoming so frustrated with the snow that he believes his wife is the "Snow Devil" and bludgeons her to death in a fit of rage, and also murders his son because he never really liked his son and was slowly poisoning him anyway.  Jack is acquitted of his crimes because - well who could blame him - the snow sometimes makes you do some funny things. And children suck.  Yep.  That's the shining in a nutshell...) 

And just in case I have been living inside a cellar for the past week, my mother (who has just learned the "art" of text messaging...) has been constantly waking me up with text messages like "man, this weather" or "it's snowing here" or "another day of work!' I am pretty close to blocking her phone number from my phone.  Not because I am upset with her, or ashamed of receiving her text messages.  The only reason why I would would be to make her pissed off at me (that's right - I am that kind of daughter). My mom will probably read this and immediately text me afterwards about that too.  Oh mother...

So I wiped out on the bus the other day, and I don't think I will ever get over it.  Falling down is one thing, but falling ass-first on the bus is something else.  And I love when people fall they usually say something like "there's a slippery spot here" or "jeez, these boots" or "I'm kind of retarded".  I really wanted to say the latter, but bit my tongue.  So I just sat on the bus and awaited my faithful stop to get the eff off and never see those bastards again.  Until I took the exact same bus to work the next day (and the day after that, and the day after that..you get the picture)

I could use this time to go into greater detail about how much I HATE public transit, but I will take the high-road and let it stew inside of me until I snap one day and go on some sort of shooting rampage.  At a shooting range.  Against a paper target. Then I will go home and sleep soundly knowing I could've (but didn't).  But could've. That's the main thing I guess.  

See you again when I decide to (a) stop taking the bus or (b)  buy a gun.

What?!?! I am no longer a scorpio?

Some people start new projects when the calendar turns over another year.  Some people feel compelled to do so when they get another year older.

I decided to start this blog when my astrological world seemingly crashed around me.

January 13, 2011.  The day that will NEVER be forgotten.  Move over, D-day.  Take a seat, 9/11.  Even you, Titanic.  Back of the bus please.  Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could prepare us for this onslaught.  Nobody is safe.  It's terrorism that crosses borders.  Crosses generations, genders, most sexual preferences (would lesbians be excluded from this?), beliefs, EVERYTHING.

This morning I was reading my horoscope in the free newspaper whilst waiting for my almost always tardy bus.  This is the usual routine for me.  I mean let's be serious for a moment... how else would I plan my day if not for my own personal bible verse - in the form of generic daily advice? Well, hours later... BAM.  My usually mysterious Scorpio self has become a less-interesting, scale-toting but still very bland Libra.   How can this be after 3000 years?  Couldn't this news have waited for another 3000 years (or at least until 2012 when we will all be dead from the Mayan calendar apocalypse/second-coming?).

Now, as I sit in my room, listening to a Dave Matthews Live album, sipping green tea, I wonder: is this the real me? Is ANY of this real anymore? Or am I in some sort of Twilight Zone (Read: NOT TWILIGHT the movie.  Or book.  They can both succumb to death by the Mayans) episode where I am beautiful and all the medical staff look like farm animals and I am somehow seen as the hideous one?   Should I now, as a Libra, set my place on fire, and in essence "Chris McCandless" myself (don't know that reference? Watch/read Into The Wild) and die alone in the middle of the Alaskan tundra delirious from lack of nutrients and weak from fighting a bear, but nonetheless happy that I changed my life so drastically to become a true Libra.

Or I could simply become a Librarian.

Well, at least I still have my great sense of humour.  No astrological fanatic can take that away from me.



Until my horoscope tells me to write again,

The Scorpion Scale