The Red Dragon Dreams of Norwegian Wood

I've hit a patch of mid-flight joy - rare on my dragon rides. Here, my dear, is the good news:

1. The Brus$els people are paying for me to go to Montréal for an interview next weekend, when one of their officiants is attending a conference there. Even if they don't hire me, I'll be up a trip to Montréal to see Mrs. L and Miss K, not to mention up the self respect of an organization taking me seriously enough for an editing role to bring me to Montréal.

2. Last night, the TSO played Mozart's fifth violin concerto in A major, which was nifty, especially the 'Turkish' bits (hah! Turks wish - if that was the way their music went they'd just be running around their country twirling and dancing all day, and I bet you ten bucks they don't). What was even niftier was Henning Kraggerud, the soloist. I think I may have pointed out I hate the violin, because there is no sound worse in the range of sounds humanity makes then a badly played violin. It's like someone running their nails down a chalkboard while they vomit. My disgust isn't just based on having played it badly myself for years, but also on the fact that a genius playing a violin is maybe the loveliest sound in the range of human sounds. Don't get me wrong, it's always lovely when the TSO does violin concertos and the soloists are always wonderful, but Henning Kraggerud . . . his name is Henning Kraggerud, which is jaw-dropping in itself; can you imagine the booty his ancestors brought home from pillaged villages? Talk about providers.

And, well, he looks like this.

And something without warning bears heavy on the Red Dragon's mind

Yesterday I got another book to review, The Ethical Gourmet - not sure how I feel about it so far. Laboured, angry prose in the opening chapters, and very, very American. I really would have appreciated a Canadian edition, or at least references for where to find Canadian information, but - oh, it's too early in the morning to fuss over that. It'll still get a great review if the recipes are good; I'll run ten of them and see how delicious they are. A fun thing about the book is that it's for omnivores, which I am, full of instruction about how to buy ethically slaughtered animals. Talked to the F-word about what a fun job it would be to review cookbooks.

Anyways. Tonight is some Mozart. That will help me relax, which is good, because I'm as twitchy as a hungry cat. I just have to get over the task of the next couple of days (university application - involved, difficult) and then I can go back to just getting wound up over job applications. I need to relax more, apparently.

What changed? Nobody relaxed like me. I was a fucking champion relaxer, and now a trained professional is telling me to run more daily cost-benefit analyses to see if I really need to be doing all the things I'm doing. And he's right. Things started feeling like they were jerking unmanageably at the reins when I stopped doing obsessive cost-benefit analyses. Anyways. I guess it's good that I had a little relaxation intervention while I'm still young and gorgeous, with a functioning cardio-respiratory system.

The Red Dragon Still Doesn't Like Her Job

My first rejection (that counts, ergo est, I was actually qualified for the job in question, more or less) of this blitz came this morning. It makes me sad but not very because it was in London, and as exciting and awesome as that would be the apartments are tiny and expensive and the winters are oppressively dark. The only complaint I'd like to register in respect to the news is that they opened the rejection letter "Dear J___," and I found the familiarity misleading. Please. If you're not going to give me money, address me by my last name.

The stupid fucking conference I went to yesterday was purgatorial. Two speakers, one on neuromarketing and the other on more abstract psychological aspects of emotional marketing were very interesting. A few others were decent. The rest were bloody dismal, especially the fucking useless Youthography presentation. How do those people still get work? Every time I hear a Youthography presentation it's the same damn thing. Involve the young this, don't assume that, the occasional "shit," "piss" or "ass" thrown into the text of the presentation because the balding failed rock star speaker is trying to sound iconoclastic. Blathering on endlessly about involving youth and not consecending to them, while using a slew of meaningless buzzwords as jargony and illiterate as the most traditional of mass media marketers. All in the context of presenting consumers aged 14-29 as a meaningfully coherent demographic and admitting traditional media is still the best way to reach the young.

I ask you . . . ?????? That's all. Here is a brief list, by no means exhaustive, of the abuses of the English language that were committed yesterday:

1. "a granular approach"
2. "it needs to be more aggregate"
3. "a grassroots advertising campaign"
4. "we utilized a methodology"
5. "the best way to measure kids is an ad-sensitive approach"

Geez. Anyways, it wasn't all bad. The psych emo marketer sat next to me at lunch; I didn't recognize him without his reading glasses, but then we had a nice conversation about Carl Jung and the role of religion in modern life and the marketing industry. Nice talk with my boss, too. There's a bit of a media storm he's caught in at the moment, which he SHOULDN'T be in - meaningless nonsense because of a small error in my old department and now he's getting hassled with newspapers claiming he's not returning calls when he spends all day returning them and semi-literate partisan bloggers getting bloggy - oh, it makes me mad.

Cities come and cities go

Oh boy. Yesterday I got a new book to read - The Story of French - and the first fifty pages are great. That's in part because I don't know anything about the history of French and almost every other fact is a surprise, but I'm also enjoying the nice, conversational style of writing and the occasional unmistakable elegance of an educated francophone dumbing it down to communicate effectively in English. I'm going to bring it with me to the bullshit conference I'm going to (along with, for the first time, some tupperware to steal the food) as soon as I have a go at applying for one of the jobs I found yesterday that need applying to. I must say the job search has felt a little better since becoming aware that some people are taking me seriously and not just binning the rez and everything as soon as it crosses their desks.

But no, I STILL haven't heard from the ant1-c0rruption people. Sigh. But I'm still looking at ads for apartments in Bru$sels and Berl1n during my downtime. I know it's pathetic, but they have some really awesome apartments and seem to be proportionately so much cheaper than Toronto or Paris. Anyways. Stop judging me. I'm excited, is all, even though the future is no more amorphous than usual.

Barf

Good morning, good morning, indeed, it's at least a morning. I feel fucking sick - got home retardedly, frustratingly late last night, and let me go on record as saying the Killers suck. I find it nauseating that the lead singer has been compared so much to Bruce Springsteen. Ripping off a few melodic patterns from 'Born to Run' and singing retard lyrics like 'don't you want to come with me, don't you want to feel my heart' in a castrated, tremulous whine that seems to have needed a machine to stay on key does not a fucking Bruce Springsteen tribute make. Maybe a Richard Marx tribute - a weak one. Fuck. They were alot better when they were trying to be English.

In other news, it was a pleasant, relaxing weekend. So pleasant and relaxing that hours would go by without me thinking about my employment prospects. So when the phone rang at 5 o'clock yesterday displaying "Unknown Number" I think the F-word and I even joked a little about how it couldn't possibly be someone wanting an interview. And then it was. I nearly flipped but I think I squeezed out coherent words. It was a screening interview from a lady who was on her way to a European bed for something I'd applied to months and months ago that paid good, good money. Weeee! Anyways, I'm still thrown by that. Watch me work like a dervish today.