According to the story in the Globe and Mail, extramarital affairs that occur between members of the same sex don't count. Seems a woman was suing for divorce after her husband admitted an affair with another man. The judge refused to grant a summary divorce (as opposed to a no-fault after a year apart) because according to common law an adulterous affair is "penetrative sexual contact between a man and a woman not married to each other and one of whom is married to someone else,".
She now wants to change the definition to include when the husband shags the pool-boy. Those straight people are nuts, wanting to change the definition of deeply held, societally established beliefs. They really shouldn't be mucking about with such things. I mean if adultery was good enough for their ancestors, and if their ancestors never thought to enumerate gay sex as adulterous, well by omission they MUST not have meant for it to be included. And that means that gay sex isn't adulterous.
More Mies
Werner Herzog
I've changed only one word of this quote from noted film-maker, Werner Herzog, to describe my current mood, and overall opinion of corporate culture.
"Life in the [corporate world] must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger."
hey all you bloggers, you'll notice that my page no longer has that awful blue bar with the blogger logo at the top and a 'blog this' link. if you want to remove it on your own blog, click here.
Slow moving day
I'm hungover. It's Saturday mor... oops, afternoon and I'm finally gettin' my shit together. Or i will when I've written this blog entry and gone for a shower. It was a long week, most of it punctuated quite regularly by drinking and socializing. So not a bad week, but a tough one. Yesterday was my boss's last day at work, so the drinking started at 1pm and I just continued it. I cabbed home at 2.15 this morning and fell into a nearly dreamless slumber, only to be woken by a hangover six and a half hours later.
This morning has been quite slow. Thank god for a cup of tea and then eric made French Toast (or Pain d'Or in French which is weird or not because why would they call it... but then again, we DO call them English Muffins. Oh well whatever. Eric makes spectacular French Toast. He also makes good porridge. Or as we call it: grau. French word for oats or whatever the hell. For those of you not from Canada who may read this blog, our packaging is entirely bilingual. (So we not only have Cap'n Crunch but Capitaine Crounche). So yes, the French Toast. It's goooood. and we have a lot of syrup - the real maple shit man. none of that Aunt Jamima shite for us. We are Canadian and we consume real Quebec maple syrop (thanks Yannick).
Now i'm going to slowly try to get my shit together and get something done today.
god help me. I've just re-read my blog entry. you know a while back i said i should never blog while depressed. well I clearly shouldn't do it when i'm hungoer either.
Can o' Whupass
Today I faxed the following to the president of Home Depot. It's a boring topic I know but it's one which is occupying my head at the moment.
For the last four months my partner and I have been engaged in having a kitchen (cabinets/countertop etc.) installed in our house by Home Depot. This letter is being written to you because that process has gone very badly and today, we are faced with yet another example of where Home Depot has failed.
I had intended to write a full, long letter detailing the specifics of what we have gone through, at the end of the project, but the water in my basement has increased the need for more immediate attention. So I will limit myself here to the short version of the facts.
From the very start the process that we have been engaged in, to have a kitchen installed in our house, (including fridge, stove, dishwasher, countertops, cabinetry) has been onerous, difficult, time-consuming, and at times ridiculous. It took 5 trips, over more than a month to order the kitchen. So between the day we decided to buy from you, to the day we actually paid you, was over a month. This was down to, what I would characterise as, an incredibly convoluted process, marked by no single person seeming to take any kind of ownership of it.
As well there were some places where the logic of your process defies any kind of explanation. When delivering cabinets, did you know that you only provide �curbside� delivery? This means that the client has to haul the cabinets into the house themselves, the delivery person won�t, nor will the installer. I�m an able-bodied man and so was able to manage, but I can only wonder what my mother or an elderly person would do.
Now if the problem were only process then this would be an academic argument over organizational and process design. But it wasn�t. In all cases, every single thing you delivered was late. When the appliances were delivered, we were given a 4 hour window, they arrived 90 minutes beyond that. They brought a fridge with the doors on the wrong side and then spent the next 90 minutes switching it, after being none too pleased about doing so. But having paid an extra $25 for the correct fridge, we weren�t letting them leave until it was done. When the cabinets were delivered, they were two doors short. We picked up the doors at your store on the weekend, then they delivered two more doors the following week (without actually telling us they were coming). As well, we had a number of extra bits and pieces delivered that we have no need of.
After the install of the cabinets, a template was made for the counter. A week later we called the store for an update and it hadn�t been ordered yet. How long it would have been before Home Depot noticed the problem remains a mystery. When the countertop was finally delivered, an install date was set. The installer called and left a message changing the agreed upon date. He subsequently did not return our calls when we tried to get back in touch, so we were stuck making arrangements to accommodate him on a date that was not suitable. Then, the revised install date came and went and he didn�t show up. Finally after numerous calls, that day and the day after, to both the store and the installer, he returned our calls and agreed to come the next day. That was Tuesday of this week. We thought we were done, and that we�d get to use our kitchen. After doing some dishes last night we released the water in the sink and discovered that all of it ended up in the basement.
It would seem that while installing the sink, the installer pulled or tugged or who knows what, and now the drain is leaking. The only thing that surprises me about this latest problem is that there was even anything more that could have gone wrong.
This letter is to bring this to your attention, and to ask what you and Home Depot can and will do to rectify this situation, and to address what has been, overall, a disappointing experience. At the moment I can�t imagine what would make me do business with Home Depot again.
Home Depot Hell
I haven't been boring everyone on the blog about the trials of our latest home renovation (those unfortunate enough to be near us in person however are hearing all about it). But I have to share this. This is how fucked up the world is. The countertop was delivered Thursday. The installer was to come in saturday, but called to say he woudln't. Sneaky bastard left a voicemail to that effect and promptly stopped returning calls. He said, instead, that he'd come in Monday (today). No prizes if you can guess the next bit - he didn't. He's now utterly fucking missing. Home Depot can't find him.
I hate this shit. This is why when I buy my next place it will be so finished, that it will have those eco-green lightbulbs that last for 20 years. Because I swear to fuck if I have to do anything more than hang a fucking curtain in the next place, I will BURN IT DOWN!!!
Porn Titles
We still get mail for the guy who used to live here before us. One of the things we get (aside from seed catalogs and stamp collecting books) is his porn catalog from Club Priv�. It's an amusing monthly insight into what turns people on. Mostly it's straight stuff with one page of boring gay porn at the back. But the straight stuff is anything but boring. I've told most of you, I think, about some of the titles, and how very very specific the fetishes are (I mean how many people in the world are actually into "Granny Does Tranny"?) But what I love about porn is the titles - I think that they spend more money and creativity on the titles and box design than they do on the script. This month's catalog included:
"As Time Goes Bi"
"The Porn Identity"
"More Than A Woman" (more she-male porn)
Of course I still think the best title I've seen so far is "Shaving Ryan's Privates".
This is an image I took of the CBC (so yah I'm probably breaking an IP law but fuck it). I'm enjoying our summer. But to all those (hamish) who moan about the heat here look at this pic (of Australia beleive it or not) and shudder. because in a couple of short months we'll be freezing our asses off and we'll have something really worth complaining about.
Movies
I don't much go in for the movie review blog thing - so I won't start now. Instead I'll just say that I watched two very good films this weekend. One is the first real gay film to come out in Singapore (a country where homosex is illegal and they caned a teenager for keying a car a few years ago). Very fun film called Rice Rhapsody. It's a comedy about a woman who has two gay sons and fears her youngest will be too. So she goes to some lengths to ensure otherwise. We can subtitle that one the "Boy Luck Club".
The second one is called Formula17 and it's a very amusing story of a virginal boy who moves up to the big city and tries to lose his virginity. The big city in this case is Taipei. The reason I watched this had NOTHING whatsoever to do with well this (although this helped).
...human beings, when asked to lie without being given sufficient justification, will convince themselves that the lie they are asked to tell is the truth. Only when sufficient justification is given, researchers speculated, are human beings able to resist having their mind instantly reprogrammed by any request that they lie...
In short we can convince ourselves of anything. In fact, unless we're given a damn good reason not to, we WILL convince ourselves of anything. It's not what I thought it meant. For years now i've been using the term to connote holding two entirely contrary thoughts in your head at the same time and beleieving both. Whereas it really is about what happens when you do.
I don't know where this was going. Only I guess to ask: is it possible to be happy and unhappy at the same time? Is it possible to enjoy yourself and hate what you're doing?
Fuck I should just not get too philosophical on a sunday afternoon.
I'm going out now.
A Good Looking Day
On the subway today on the way home I ran into a guy I've talked to a few times online. Even went so far as to meet him for a drinkie one night a few years ago. But he ate something weird and threw up. I'm going with that explanation and not the alternative one of he found me so repulsive that he threw up. Anyway we never did anything beyond that, aond only chatted a few more times online. But since have been nodding acquaintences. He's quite cute really, cute accent and everything.
So anyway he's working in my work neighborhood now and we met on the subway today. It became quite clear from the searching glances (read: cruising) that he's all interested in me. He asked me for my 'name card' (you gotta love that asian way of talking) and we promised to do lunch.
I don't know what that's about really. It's happened before when you see someone not interseted and all of a sudden they are interested. It's weird. Or not, it could be just natural. I mean i wondered as i went home on the subway what i was looking like today that made me more attractive than the other 16 times we've seen each other in the last 3 years. When I guess it could be that there's something different in his life that makes him find me attractive. Or something. In any case I'm flattered. I guess i was having a 'good looking day'. Whatever it is, I'll take it.
