Recent Journal Entries

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.

From The Canadian Press:

Right. So, to recap, people are thinking that giving girls a vaccination against genital warts will convince them that they’re free to go! Forget that whole pregnancy thing, or AIDS (really, I mean, that’s so last year). Even if a girl has never heard of gonorrhea, syphilis, or chlamydia, my thought is that HPV isn't going to be their biggest concern, protection-wise. What is wrong with people's brains?

Today I did laundry. This, in itself is uneventful. A lot of people do laundry, especially on Sunday. But the problem itself wasn’t the laundry. I was heading to the laundry room in the apartment building to grab my now-dry laundry, and on the way there I saw a laundry card lying on the floor in the hallway. I said "oh dear", and picked it up. I looked around and saw someone at the elevator with some large garbage bags full of whatever, but not anyone frantically or even idly searching for anything. So I went to the office to turn it in, and they’d just closed about ten minutes previously. So I decided the best thing to do would be to drop it in the secure mailbox for the office. My instinct upon discovering that I’d lost my card and searching fruitlessly for it would be to ask if anyone had turned one in at the office, and so I figured other people would do the same.

The reason I did this is because the cards are essentially like cash. And they can have up to $50 on them, and they’re worth a $40 security deposit on top of that. I was reluctant to ask anyone if they had dropped the card. It would be awful to hand it over to someone who claimed it was theirs to later find out that the rightful owner was still missing their card, and that there was a lot of money on it.

Of course, having done this, Murphy’s Law kicks in and the woman I’d earlier seen at the elevator with garbage bags is now in the laundry room asking if anyone had seen a laundry card. I, being the sort that is reflexively, pathologically honest, immediately say that I’d found a card in the hallway and put it in the office mail slot. Evidently she stopped listening to me halfway through my sentence (I hate that) because her shoulders relaxed and she held out her hand to me in a partially distracted fashion. I didn’t have a card to give to her, of course, so I said once again that I’d put it in the office mail slot. She didn’t understand what this is (it's a secure slot for people to put their monthly rent cheques in -- they check it daily is my understanding) so I told her I would show her, and we walked down the hallway to the office. She was getting upset already and I knew in my heart that this would get very bad. We got to the slot, I actually tried to retrieve it from inside the slot, and I couldn’t. At this point, she began berating me and raising her voice at me and asking me why I didn’t just give it to her -- why I’d done what I’d done -- why didn’t it occur to me to ask around as to who it belonged -- what was I thinking -- why didn’t I think...

I interrupted her once to say that I didn’t see her drop it and I didn’t know it was hers, and that was why. It seemed a simple, logical answer to me, but evidently she was of the mindset that I should have immediately wandered down to the elevators where she was and asked her if she’d dropped a laundry card.
Now, if I’d seen the card fall out of her pocket or whatever, my immediate instinct would be to call out, "you dropped your card!" But the thing is, the card is potentially worth almost $100. I couldn’t even tell that she’d done laundry as all her clothes were in opaque black garbage bags, and for God’s sake it’s Sunday afternoon. Half the building does laundry on Sunday. ANYONE could have dropped the card. So what I did was the right thing.

Regardless, she was obviously not going to see it this way. It’s hard to describe just how immature and unbelievable the woman was, but I honestly felt like I couldn’t possibly be dealing with an adult. My brain was kind of whirling around, thinking the equivalent of, "I’m a grown-up now. This is the grown-up world, isn’t it? Is this how grown-ups act?" and just generally being a bit dazed by the relentless harassment of this woman.
I lost patience with her quite early, though, and when she asked me what I could possibly have been thinking for the second time, I basically rolled my eyes as I walked past her and impatiently said, quietly, "just trying to be a good person". I dismissed her with that comment, so although my brain registered that she’d come up with some kind of response, I don’t remember what it was.

Oh, and also, I did apologize after offering my explanation. I said something like, "I felt it was safest, not knowing whose it was, to put it in the office box. I do apologize knowing now that it was yours," and she cut me off with something like "well you were stupid and I don’t care about your apology" and when I pointed out that they were open early the next morning she insisted that she didn’t want to get it tomorrow, she needed it NOW. I refrained from commenting, but she obviously had just carted her dry laundry upstairs, and it appeared to be her entire wardrobe’s worth, so she was done for the day (as another woman in the laundry room confirmed for me when I asked). She didn’t "need it right now". Hell, she won't need it for a week at least unless she goes through seventeen outfits a day. Yes, she’s inconvenienced as she’ll have to inquire at the office about it tomorrow, but that’s the extent of it.

The way that I read her, unfortunately, is that she’ll be the type to actively harass me whenever she sees me. I just got an overwhelming sense of immaturity, irrationality, and bullying from her. And it’s just overwhelming to me that there are people like that in the adult world. I mean, I knew in theory, but I suppose I've never been confronted with it before.

The thing is, I know I did the right thing, and if she were to ask me what I’ll do if it happens again, I’d have to honestly tell her that I’ll do the same thing. I’d want someone to turn in my card if they found it, even if they found it while I was walking right by it. If I was in the middle of laundry when it got lost, I’d find a kind person willing to lend me their card and hand them the money to cover it. There’s always a way to figure things out. Heck, if the lady whose card I found had been in the middle of laundry and needed it, I would have offered to let her use my card and just grab a couple of dollars from her to cover it.

You can bet that if I’d asked the people around, and someone had claimed it as theirs, and she’d found out, she’d be screaming bloody murder and asking why I hadn’t thought to turn it into the office. "What were you thinking?! Why would you just hand a card to someone who says it’s theirs? You have no way of knowing! You are so STUPID!"

I was hoping writing this would get it off of my shoulders but I still feel like shaking her.

http://toronto.kijiji.ca/c-housing-room-rental-roommates-FREE-RENT-FOR-A-FEMALE-W0QQAdIdZ17569515