Just a Bunch of Stuff 

Something is off today. The street car was uncommonly busy and crowded this morning (for the time I travel). It feels cold and damp but the snow under foot crunched dryly. My toes are icy nubs at the end of my feet and I can’t get them any warmer. My hair seems thinner. My neck is stiffer. My back aches but isn’t stiff. My guts are roiling as though I drank 10 cups of coffee followed by a can of black beans. Worse of all, despite my nose being congested by a winter’s worth of dry crumble, I seem to be suffering some kind of olfactory dissonance; the street car stank of mouldy hockey equipment, the heater vent by the office entrance blasted out air that smelled like a cheese fridge, walking to my desk I noticed a slightly ammonia, piss-vinegar scent. Now in the kitchen there is a vaguely vanilla perfume, which would be normal if I weren’t drinking lemon tea.

Other portending signposts of curious happenstance? A usually quiet corner of the office was lively and loud like an outdoor market, my normally near dormant e-mail inbox was jammed with dozens of messages and my phone refuses to believe it has any connection to the outside world. Stranger still, people keep talking to me despite having my head down in this laptop.

If nothing odd or out of the ordinary events follow today then I can only conclude two things. One, my instincts are completely wrong, which wouldn’t really surprise me, or two, it’s just a bunch of stuff I noticed.

Seen in Parts of December and Mostly January 

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Martin Freeman as said Hobbit.

Every Christmas I figure I’ll have nothing to do but watch movies. It never turns out that way but it always seems in January I catch up with all the things I wanted to see. I assume that’s because it’s -25ºC out and I have no interest in biking, swimming, running or even being at home imagining new ways to consume cheese. Also, there’s a mix of award shows telling what was worth seeing and TV shows going into mid-season hiatus or something. Thus it was that I only saw three films in December but I saw a lot of movies and TV in January.
Read more »