Recent Journal Entries

In 1914, on Christmas, soldiers on both sides of the battle stopped fighting. This wasn’t a planned thing and it was quite in defiance of all orders. But they lit candles and played football and celebrated as though they weren’t in the middle of killing each other. Young men who were relieved to have a break from their fighting in the same way that kids in their first year of university are relieved to have midterms over and done with. Children.
I can’t really get my head around kids younger than my littlest brother being handed guns and sent off to bear the psychological weight of killing other people.

Today, those kids my youngest brother’s age can play war games on a computer and consider it fun. I don’t begrudge them that, although I will never understand why war-based computer games are so appealing. But today, it is important for everyone to note that you can play games where you pretend you’re fighting a war because you are lucky to be born in this time, in this part of the world, and in this incarnation of history where the actual fighting to give you that right has been done and was successful.

It isn’t good to dwell on the past and on the horrors that people can cause when they forget the fundamental truth that other people are just as real and as important and as beloved as they are, but it is necessary to never forget.

Okay everyone that missed it the first time despite my insistence and my warnings: Dr Horrible is now back online for free viewing for another limited window of time.


Or, here's your link so you can watch it in a bigger format:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog

Go see it now!

Quick, internet: tell me what I did to my car! I guess I accidentally put it into "2" rather than "D" (I have an automatic and only ever use "D") and I didn't realize for 15 minutes that my car was doing 5500 RPM. Did I kill it? It's a 12 year old Nissan Maxima that was kind of a death trap to begin with, although I think it has the will to live...did I just cut its life short?

*panics*

I don't think I mentioned that some months ago I applied to FACTOR.

Application No.	Status	Artist	Type
DAxxxx	ready_for_jury	Meagan	Demo Award

it's that "ready_for_jury" part that all of a sudden made me nervous. My music is going to be juried. :/

Today I am going to talk about names. Names are a tricky thing in this day and age, as they come from all over the globe and even your basic names can be spelled in new and terrifying ways. My name is Meagan. It's not the most common way to spell it, but it's not far off the mark.

And yet.

I have taken to, when I am asked for my name, answering exactly like this:

"Meagan. m, e, **A**, g, a, n."

Past precedent has dictated that unless I deliberately, slowly, empatically emphasize the first A in my name, people will blithely assume it's spelled one of half a dozen other ways. No one has ever gotten it right after I spell it out, and 26 years of that is a long time for no one to ever have gotten it right. So I answer in the above fashion.
And would you believe that 99% of the time, people still spell it 'Megan' after supposedly listening to me, typing the name one letter at a time as I speak them. Just yesterday, I answered at LensCrafters so that an associate could look up my file.
"Meagan. m, e, **A**, g, a, n."
"You're not in our system."
"I assure you I am. It's spelled Me **A** gan."
*checks again, shakes head* "no, you're not in here."
"You're missing the first A."
"Oh, sorry. Meag E n. I'm still not finding you."
"No, g A n" (which she got right back at the beginning!!)

And, by the way, that's what the other 1% do when I spell my name for them. They'll get the "MEA" part correctly, but they'll choose between "GHAN" or "GEN" after that. And it usually takes three rounds of corrections for them to get it right. I just don't understand this. Some people have honestly gone through six different incorrect spellings of my name, with me very carefully spelling it correctly each time, before they get it right. It's like they decide that despite the fact that they're getting it wrong, they'll cycle through every permutation that they can think of before actually listening to me spell my own name.

That automatic "h" bothers me. There's a cadence to the way I spell my name out loud. Three letters, the third one quite emphasized, then three more. m e A; g a n. And yet far too many people stick an H in there. It's like they think, "well, she's got a superfluous letter in there, so we might as well throw a few more in". Seriously, people, if a person is deliberately spelling out their name, listen to them. People with commonly spelled names rarely do that, so there's probably a reason.

(Once, at Chapters, I was trying to order a book and I was shuffled between about five different people altogether, back and forth, and between them they spelled my name (including my last name which adds even more confusion despite only being four letters and one syllable) eight different incorrect ways. I was impressed. One of them spelled it "Meegan Flue".)

I should wear a nametag around my neck. But then, when people inevitably still got it wrong, I'd have to bludgeon them, so unfortunately it's not a practical solution.

So. After having done my best to pull out of the Canadian Tire lot, make my way across the road and get stuck on Dundas trying to pull into a gas station, getting towed and paying far too much for it, losing 3 hours of that day, and generally not being pleased with the whole scenario, guess where we had to tow the car yesterday (flat spare, if you recall) to get the tires changed out?

No, go ahead, guess.

Yeah. The same fucking Canadian Tire where they went flat in the first place.

So I don’t generally write in this journal. I tend to keep things in my head and talk them over with myself, so I don’t feel like writing, but I just feel like whining about this one. So here goes.

Yesterday it was snowy. Very much so. No one was out because we were all basically snowed in. Nonetheless, I had things to do, so I ventured out. I was happy going 10km per hour. It was leisurely, people were all driving just as slowly as I was, so it actually wasn’t that dangerous. I got a fair amount of shopping done, and at about 5pm I was over in the Oakville area, about 25 minutes (on a regular day) from where I live. I pull into Canadian Tire and all of a sudden the car seems to be making more noise.

I checked the tires and one was totally flat. That tire had had a slow leak up till now, so I thought, "maybe it’s just gone very flat and I can fill it back up again" as the refillings had done the trick up until now. So I pulled out of the Canadian Tire lot (with a lot of effort -- the flat tire was a front one) and made my way across the road the the gas station. Almost. I attempted to pull into the station, but the snow on the slight slope into it proved to be too much for the car without a tire. It was about 5:00 when this happened. I tried to reverse, I tried to move at all -- no good. And I was stuck on Dundas, which is a very major road. I put my hazards on and called CAA, which said that it was very busy, so it may be 2-3 hours (even with putting me on priority because I’m in a major road!) before anyone could show up. So I waited, hoping no one would hit me. At about 7:30 a policeman showed up, and sympathised with my plight, but said that unfortunately, we can’t wait indefinitely for CAA as I’m a big hazard. So he got a tow truck which pulled me 5 feet forward into the gas station, and put the spare tire on. They also charged me $100 for the priveledge. And they only accepted cash. No credit cards, nothing but cash. Now, I didn’t have cash on me, and since I’d been doing hardcore christmas shopping for three days, and I’d diligently paid a bunch of bills on the friday, there was no money left in the account that I could draw from at an ATM. I eventually convinced them to take a cheque (which they insisted I make out to CASH) and I’ve tranferred money into that account now, so everything’s fine there, but I still find that very suspect.

So end of story, right?
Of course not. The spare tire is flat! Didn’t discover *that* until I got home. (this is yet another point on the long list of proofs that I bought a car not worthy even being called a car. The thing’s a death trap, seriously). So I took Jon’s car to work today, and he's trying to get my tires changed; he could only find one place with the right tires in stock (yes, I have to change all four tires. The guy sold me the car with bald tires), and they’re going to charge him over $450 just for those, and now it seems we have to buy a new spare tire. Also, he has to get towed to the place, as the spare tire is quite flat. Last night it was just badly underfilled, this morning it was flat. I don't even know what to say.

Okay, so now that the wedding madness is over and done with, I'm actually going back into the studio to resume recording. Hopefully I'll be a little more efficient with actually getting the songs done at a reasonable rate. :)

At the moment it's a bit tricky to schedule with my producer, but when I go in hopefully I can book quite a few sessions into november and december.

For those who want to know, the three days I've got at the moment are September 27, October 17, and October 29. The 27th, of course, being tomorrow. :)

I'll hopefully get the recording calendar up again so that I can give a bit of a run-down of what I did. As always, updates and the calendar link will be at http://www.dryadsong.com/music/.

Without looking anything up, just off the top of your head, give me a couple of charicteristics of a koala. Just what comes to mind immediately. The basics.
(I’ll edit this to explain why the heck I’m asking in a little bit).

The Anticipated Edit With Information:
I came across a program online that was a 20 questions game someone wrote almost 20 years go. It learns based on peoples answers, and thus it has actually become uncannily smart with regards to figuring out what you're thinking about. It managed to guess everything I was thinking until I got to thinking about a koala.
If I recall, once we got past the very first question, "Animal, vegetable, mineral or other?", it asked me "Is it a mammal?" Of course, I answered "No", as koalas are not mammals, they're marsupials.

After getting through a bunch of increasingly unrelated questions, the computer gave up and asked me what I was thinking about. I told it koala and it let me know why it hadn't gotten it right. Apparently humanity as a population had taught it that koalas were mammals. I always thought it was a well-known fact that they weren't -- hell, there are more than a few marsupials in Australia; that's the place to be for marsupials. But evidently the human race (or, at least, the computer using population over the last two decades) feels that koalas are mammals. Now, no one said "marsupial" in their comments, here, although no one actually said "mammal" either, so I'd like to believe that you all merely figured it was a given and chose not to mention it. What say you all to this apparent "cute + fuzzy = mammal" phenomenon?


Edit: okay. I guess I suck. I remember being taught in highschool that marsupials were different than mammals, and that's what stuck in my head. But as it turns out, I'm just wrong. This is why I'm in microbiology. Give me Escherichia vs. Shigella any day. Large organisms? Not so much, apparently.