When Facebook Memes Attack!

"The "Rules" : Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you. Copy and paste this and then go to the notes section of your profile."

1. My body's sleep schedule seems to run on a 25-hour rhythm. If I have no pressing reason to get up for an extended period of time, I'll be waking up at 9am, then 1pm, then 4pm, then eventually later, until it cycles all the way back.

2. I'm in the Army reserves. It's like no other job on this planet.

3. English is my second language.

4. I'm the only person I know that shaves with a straight razor. They've got a bitch of learning curve, but once you're through it, the result is phenomenal.

5. Apparently, I was "Most Promiscuous Brother" of AEPi's Ottawa chapter, 2007/2008. There was a vote. For once, I abstained.

6. Karaoke is my guilty pleasure.

7. I don't leave answering machine messages. There's no reason why, I just don't. I've probably left 5 in the last year.

8. I've had my M2 license since I was 16. If I don't do my final road test soon, it's going to expire.

9. I procrastinate. It's ridicu... fuck it.

10. I'm teaching myself - slowly - guitar.

11. Songs that recurringly get stuck in my head:
"Proud Mary," Ike and Tina Turner
"City Blues," Brian Wilson and Eric Clapton
"You Can't Hurry Love," either the Phil Collins cover or The Supremes' original.

12. Dvorjak and Dr Dre are next to each other in my iTunes. My taste is eclectic.

13. I've been to Israel 15 times, and I'm STILL eligible for Birthright.

14. I put all my private thoughts in a blog, but I don't share it with people I know in real life. Tried that once, it didn't go well; for their own good, nobody should ever know what I'm actually thinking.

15. When I have the time, I take hot showers that last easily 45 minutes, sometimes 60. I'm not even masturbating in there, just chillin'.

16. Questionable Content. Favourite web comic.

17. If I've got the time, the money, and the means, I have never turned down a road trip.

18. I've been to the fundamentalist Christian "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. Great shit.

19. I've been arrested.
Once.
While on a public bench.
For trespassing.

20. I love my bathrobe. It's big and purple, and I'm wearing it right now. I take it anywhere I'm staying for more than a night. I've driven across Tennessee in it, and I was the one driving.

21. I've elevated public nudity to high art, and I don't have to be drunk to streak.

22. My addiction, aside from nicotine, alcohol, and carnal sin, is raw oyster. Sit me down in front of them, and I'll eat oysters until you run out of shellfish, or I run out of money.

23. My cell phone and laptop don't get turned off.

24. I'm swearing off Hamilton Karaoke bars for at least two weeks. Those of you who were there know my reasons.

25. I am the least organized person you will ever meet. At my last place, all my floorspace went missing.

26. I'm terrible at math.

27. I'm invisible.

Bondage down under! (Crikey!)

Because I often find myself with vast tracts of time and no productive way to spend it, I sometimes check the back-links to my blog. The back-links (or track-backs, or whatever they're actually called) are the recorded entry point that linked someone to a page on Phaedron Rising.

Usually, it's something fairly innocuous, like residual interest from the bookstore bible-shuffle at Pharyngula or Tall Penguin, or some passing interest in Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Until last week, my favourite referral was the search for "cooties sex" on Google Estonia. No more.

It seems that there's something strange afoot down in the land of dingoes and stingrays; seems some Aussie was in need of either some DIY bondage advice or a good lawyer, because he turned to the wisdom of Google's algorithm for an answer to his troubles.

A fun experiment to try at home: go to Google or Google Australia and enter as your query "having problems confining a housemate to his room" either with or without the quotation marks.

Look who's result #1! I should be flattered, but I don't deserve that accolade. A pair of handcuffs and a makeshift blindfold are the closest my repertoire ever comes to BDSM, and I shy away from using them without a safe word. Nonetheless, happy strapping to my new Australian "mate."

And remember. If the cuffs are soft and fuzzy, you're missing the point.

Sweet Home Alabama: T minus 13 hours and counting...

Short post:

Ever skip a night's sleep, just to find yourself too wired to get any rest the next evening? Counterintuitive as it seems, the last time I went to sleep was about 48 hours ago, and I don't feel tired.

I wish I did. Tomorrow's going to be a hell of a day.

I'm leaving Ottawa in a few short hours with Bryan and Kyle, en route to Nez's kidnapping in Ohio, and onward to see Sophie in Alabama. Between Ottawa and Toronto, I'll also be picking up a few drifters. Two housemates I found on craigslist's rideshare, one Carleton grad from PickupPal, and my friend Rachel from a small town in the middle of nowhere (because nothing beats five straight hours of unmitigated sexual tension.)

And I've barely begun to pack.

Nonetheless, it's been a hectic 48 hours; spent, for the most part, convincing and re-convincing my friends to commit to the odyssey, and persuading their parents to support their self-actualization with cold, hard gas money.

But through bouts of vacillation, flared tempers, doubt and uncertainty, this show is finally getting on the road. In 36 hours' time. I'll be in Birmingham.

Sins of the flesh (or, "How I invoked the wrath of God")

Tiring weekend, but I've earned this chance to brag.

A few weeks ago, I had a night of phenomenal, no-strings-attached sex with my friend Rachel in Toronto. It was in the basement guest room of family that I was visiting for the weekend, so we had to be careful and keep quiet.

Last Thursday, she came up to Ottawa to visit a girlfriend of hers for the weekend. And every night of her stay in the city, she ended ditching her friend to get laid. I was happy to oblige.

Before I get into the rest of the story, there are two things I need to explain to lay out the groundwork:

1) The house I'm renting with my friends at university is a dilapidated piece of shit. It's a rotting cliche of the life of a starving student.

2) I'm in an open relationship. Spare me the sanctimonious crap over the fact that I'm sleeping with other girls while the one I'm in love with is stuck two thousand miles away.

Back to it: We were waking up my housemates two, three times a night. Then again in the morning. And if you're doing your job right, this girl can get loud. By 3am of the second night of her visit, we'd already gotten two angry visits from my angry housemates, politely asking us to quiet the fuck down.

So we begin round 4. There was a thunderstorm outside, and it wasn't like we had anywhere better to be. By this point, I'm starting to get a feel for her particular sexual idiosyncrasies, and the sex is beyond good. My housemate had barely gotten back to bed by the time the entire house could hear her. So it goes.

This is round 4 for the evening, so it goes on for even longer than before. When we finally hit the ending bit, two things happen at once:

1. My housemate bangs on my bedroom door again, threatening me with an impromptu cold shower with the garden hose;

2. The eavestrough breaks free from the roof of my house, tearing the soffits off on the way down. (You know the part of the roof that overhangs past the side of your house? The soffits are the underside of that.)

So.

In conclusion:

I literally fucked a girl until the roof came down.

That is all.

Who knew having housemates could be this irritating?

Apologizing in advance if this post sounds incoherent. I haven't had a chance to sleep in about 48 hours, and at this point, every second between now and the evening feels like an eternity.


...On May 1st, three undergraduate students in Ottawa moved gleefully out of uni residence and into their first leased house.

Having spent 19 years counting the minutes till I could move out of my parents' homes, and the following two semesters resenting the confining rules of dorms, the move felt like pure freedom.

No ban on beer bottles. No roommate to kick out of the double when a girl comes back you your place. And university security didn't seem to like it much when I tried to get a barbeque going in the quad.

No matter.

The place is ours. Ours. After spending the better part of a week moving in and getting our respective shit in order, I drive off to Toronto for the weekend. Against my better judgement, a weekend gets railroaded into a week and a half.

Fast forward to last night. I get back to Ottawa just shy of 3am, and it's lord of the fucking flies. No clean dished left; nargila sitting in the back room for anyone to see; and the garbage clearly hasn't been emptied since we moved in.






I think I'm going to have to engrave a few commandments half an inch into the drywall.

1. If you cook yourself a meal, do the fucking dishes.

2. If someone takes over the cooking duties for the night, do the fucking dishes.

3. If you drink an entire case of my beer, don't replace it with an American import. That's just uncalled for.

4. If you have sex on furniture or surfaces in common areas of the house, have the courtesy not to tell me about it. I never told Ross about the time I hooked up on his bed while he was at a midterm. Keep it to yourself, it's a matter of respect.

5. When a girl refuses to come over because of how horrible the house is, it's time to kick into crisis mode.

6. When all else fails, the most important rule of all: don't fuck with me. The fuse box is in my room. I'm not afraid to use it.


...Long story short, I can see this going one of two possible ways...

Either we pull together, and strike a balance between personal space and shared responsibility, or we dig in our heels, and the house devolves into a petulant orgy of bitter pranks, retributions, and recriminations.