"I gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly, For the day you die, You gonna touch the sky"
-Touch the Sky, Kanye West

Some people actually do want to hear my opinions on music: I was invited to a Mix 99.9 listener panel last night. It was meant for women 24-44; I was clearly the youngest by at least 10 years. The rest were mom-types and one woman who looked like a shriveled baseball glove and pretended like she was 20 and wouldn't shut up. There were about 14 of us and it came with free dinner and free goodie bags (the real reason I went). Pretty boring and what I was expecting: What do you like/dislike about hte station, What kind of music, blah blah blah. The did ask the CanCon question to which i responded by telling them to stop playing Nickelback to meet their quota and up the Broken Social Scene, Stars, Dallas Green, Metric, anyone-other-than Michael Buble crap.

The goodie bag has it's pros- 2 packs of Bon Jovi mints! Free movie passes for...uh, The Sentinel (Dan and I are going tonight), movie passes for Akeelah and the Bee (gave them away since I'll be at Rusty's) , a Mix 99.9 t-shirt (Happy Father's Day Dad!) and $5- "What?! 5 dollars?! Get outta here!"

And the cons- Ontario Place passes (won't be here, hate Ontario Place, and thankfully no children; so I gave them away to a friend at work), a DVD of...wait for it...no, it's not Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical...it's Just Like Heaven. The good news is I'm going to see if I can exchange it for a store credit at HMV, if not, re-gifting; the book "He's Just Not That Into You" which is my most hated expression of the 21st Century (what do I care if he's not into me? It's his taste in music/film that counts) which I may either read and mock, re-gift, or just throw it out the window.

Still, it's all worth it.

Usually I could care less about getting things done but I realized that I have have 7 more nights in my apartment until my sublet comes and I camp out on Dan and Carrie-Anne's couch, 11 more days at work (the fuzzy math comes in when you realize that I'll be at Rusty's Fri-Mon), and a whopping 18 days until I depart. I've mentally planned out the CDs and DVDs I'm bringing, so as far as I'm concerend, the worst of it is over. It's just the packing up my room, the sorting of clothes, laundry, cleaning, and last minute freak-outs left. And my co-workers aren't helping me at all since they're all excited for me or want to talk about Japan, or other places to go, etc, etc, etc. Which brings me to the tedious task of cleaning out the junk I have accumulated at my desk:

In this picture you can make out ("Make out with me!"):

Ikea lamp, 2 plants- one dead, one alive, my travel calendar, Nick Nolte's mugshot, a picture of Bono that says "Your sweetheart is waiting for you" by sheer coincidence that my co-worker Caroline gave me, my mousepad, a picture of Tony, a cow paper holder, Nayeli's Chinese clock, a toy alligator, a small elephant, a small cat statue, a plastic Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants, my picture frame, a bunch of postcards, a picture of the U2 concert from May 2001, another plant, my chili pepper lights which have fallen into the empty desk on the other side of my wall, and my Tom Cruise quote where he demonstrates how crazy he is by calling Matt Lauer "glib."

And then there's the other half...

A picture of Peter Sarsgaard, a picture of Jerk Gyllenhall, a Bono 8x10 given to me by Caroline, a Napoleon Dynamite picture, the picture of Dirk with the article that Shane wrote in Dose that I found on the ground, a Shark Boy and Lava Girl pin from Nat's sister Mallory, a U2 keychain, a sign that says "I don't suffer from an addiction to Bono, I enjoy every second of it" from Caroline, a Bono picture form one of the ACC Vertigo shows, a variety of pictures, postcards, and clippings, concert ticket stubs for everything I've seen in the past year, and Pipin- the Christmas pheasant I turned into a crow for my Halloween costume 2 years ago. I also have to find my Carleton Alumni mug which is somewhere in the office.

And just because I was cleaning up my computer, I found a picture of my birthday cake, which is as delicious online as it was in real life, just like Alex "handsome in an ugly way" Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand who, I discovered, writes a weekly food column for The Guardian while the band is on tour. I added the link. I love food and unconventionally handsome, not too meaty, not too firm men.

"I'm, I'm sky high"