A worthwhile cause, and only $15. It’s possible to make a donation even if you can’t attend, you know.

Carol Todd's avatarCarol Todd's Snowflakes

When: Saturday, February 23, 2013

Where:  X Club Fitness – 1533 Broadway Street   Port Coquitlam, B.C.  604-464-5432

Time: 9:15 a.m.

As we have all heard over the past year – bullying/cyberbullying + youth mental health

have become important issues in our society.   

Let’s all come together as one and keep the awareness alive.

X Club Fitness is honoured to support The Amanda Todd Legacy Fund.

A nonprofit that is bringing awareness not only in our communities but the world

to help young people connect and establish a sense of respect for individuality of themselves and others.

Come join us in kicking these global concerns in the butt!

KICK IN THE BUTT SCHEDULE

9:15-10:15 am   YOGA
10:15-11:15 am    SPINNING
11:30-1:00 pm    ZUMBA PARTY

1:00-3:00 pm    LUNCH

(choice of burger/veggie burger or hot dog/veggie dog and a drink)

TICKETS: $12 INCLUDES LUNCH (can donate more if…

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Ready, Fire, Aim!

My books don't burn

My books don’t burn

Well, it’s official. The co-op accepted my 30 days notice, so I’ll be moving out this month. Still papers to get sorted and all that, but all in all, pretty much just what I had hoped for.

Of course, I haven’t quite locked down a new place yet. Later!

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

— Franz Kafka, Letter to Max Brod (via johnsteinbeck-)

soooooooon

soon

soon

yes, soon, very soon, it will be time. this would be a more emphatic post if my left caps key weren’t stuck but oh well, whatever, insert your own imaginary emphasis here.

vangroover, i’m leaving you.

assuming, that is, i can get all this crap packed up and thrown into storage. by tuesday.

at this point, for long, boring, paperwork-related reasons, my co-op and i have both had enough of one another. the showdown at the boardroom corral is on tuesday, and at that point they have, as i understand it, three options:

  1. evict me as of then and there, leaving the co-op legally responsible for the packing up and safe storage of my stuff. i do not think this will appeal to the board, but who knows, gordon might be there and swing the vote in favour of ‘toss her out on the street’ not knowing i have an offer of a free room at a b&b.
  2. accept my notice that i am leaving, which must by the rules be 90 days minimum. this doesn’t suit either of us very well
  3. work out a compromise whereby i have till the middle of february to pack all of this stuff up and get it the hell out of dodge.

because god knows, i am not going to get this entire apartment packed up by tuesday. ain’t happening. particularly not since yesterday i basically spent in the fetal position curled up in bed having a nervous breakdown.

so right now i am looking for two things three things:

  1. a truck, preferably 17′ or so for all my stuff, to move the stuff out once it’s all packed up
  2. a place to store it, reasonably priced and safe.
  3. someone, anyone, to help me pack. yes, it’s a hellava mess, and thinking ahead as i do, the power is off so it’s cold and dark, too. woohoo, party time eh? but i will buy pizza. and beer.

once that’s all done, pizza bought, beer drunken, i will be hitting the road via Greyhound limousine and doing some visiting. if i have the organizational skills to get my passport, i might come visit my friends in Yankistan or points south, or far east, particularly given what Raj says about the cost of living in Thailand. might hit yellowknife again, provided i get a ticket home lined up first, not like last time.

thank god i have one of those jobs that can basically be done from anywhere with an internet connection.

as for a more permanent landing pad, i have leads on a couple of very intriguing locales up in the Interior, on the reservation. if those don’t work, the island will be my next stop for sure. maybe even The Islands, who knows? Every single night since making this decision i’ve had dreams about how it’s the right decision; dreams of kayaking through the woods on a crystal stream, telling people how happy i am to be out of the city, dreams of riding across foothills of snow covered mountains, explaining how i used to live in the Big Smoke. that sort of dream, night after night. this is clearly the right decision, but the only question is, how to get the goddam packing done. thirteen years is a lot of history to put in boxes.

to say nothing of the fact that the boxes have to sit on a layer of styrofoam, because the carpet is soaked through thanks to the leaks in the building.

 

Greatest YouTube Comment in History

Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

Or, probably, in the future as well. In all of recorded time and space, in fact. And just think, Nick Denton, if your place hadn’t become a cesspool of festering Deadspin lunkheads, you could have had this on your site.

In response to an AIDs denialist in the comments on the video of Spencer Cox from the previous post:

mabonwy 16 hours ago

Oh, honey. Spencer’s toenails were better than you. They had a higher IQ, more credibility, and a better likelihood of being remembered with fondness. Spencer is now redecorating the halls of Valhalla while the best thing you can think to do with your completely unjust continued life is to troll YouTube, forsooth, in order to eke out tiny shreds of the attention you crave but can gain no other way. Because you have nothing to offer the world. You are wholly contemptible. Go pour salt on yourself.

Selah.

Spencer Cox, hero, dies

Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox

I’ve been procrastinating this for thirteen hours now, but I can no longer put it off. I have to write the obituary for a friend of mine, a great man, and a hero to millions.

Spencer Cox, founder of ActUp, and one of the key reasons an HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, has died of pneumonia.

There is literally no way to explain the impact he had on people, including me. He was a righteous warrior who gave no quarter, not an inch, to those he felt were in the wrong. He was (rightfully) called the Dorothy Parker of HIV, and was a sensitive enough man to take that as a cue to be kinder, although he never shied away from dishing out what was due.

He was the kind of hero who, when asked about his participation in the documentary How to Survive a Plague, could say the following:

One of the visceral things the film brought back for me is the rage that is still almost as fresh as the days when I first discovered it. Footage of virulently homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms reminds me even today of how much I hate (present tense) this man. I found out he’d died a few years ago when a ‘porter called me to ask for a comment, and while usually I’d ask for fifteen or twenty minutes to compose my thoughts, on this particular occasion it came slipping out before even I knew what I was saying. “It’s too little, too late.” I wanted him to suffer, and I deeply regret that the last few years of his vicious life were spent deep in the fog of senile dementia, leaving not enough consciousness for genuine suffering. His colleagues, including New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Ed Koch, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Patrick Buchanan, even the low-level Reagan press staffer who, in a transcript of an early White House daily briefing, is asked about AIDS, and reduces it to a smutty joke worthy of a quick chuckle. Karma be damned – I hate these men, and probably will until the day I die.

I met (“met”) Spencer in the comments section of Gawker, which was, for a time, the Algonquin Round Table of the 21st Century. That was some time, and a whole comment model, ago, but back in the day genius could make itself felt, and Spencer‘s always was. He didn’t throw his weight around: hell, in a pseudonymous world, none of us knew who he really was. We respected him because he was visibly wise, visibly kind, visibly passionate, and visibly a marvellous human being. He was also funny as hell.

He would get a kick out of the fact it took me two double Martinis and thirteen hours to bring myself to write this.

Eventually we became Facebook friends, and he read my blog from time to time. I’ll never forget the counsel he gave me about Occupy. “Make sure to have fun,” he said. “Don’t trust a movement that has no room for fun,” remarks he expanded on in his column in POZ.

If I have one piece of advice for young, aspiring activists, it is to always hold on to the joy, always make it fun. If you lose that, you have lost the whole battle.

And now, if you’ve never met Spencer Cox, allow me to introduce him.