This is the first evening I've spent alone with nothing to do in what feels like a long time. I had an exam on the 21st, so I spent the few days before that studying. I had a dentist appointment the next day, and then work for eight hours. And I worked during the day on the 23rd. And on the night of the 23rd I hung out with.... god, I can't even remember. Oh yes, after work I met up with Tynan and then a stoned Raj (a friend who works at Starbucks) came over and we started to watch Cool Hand Luke, this old Paul Newman movie. Raj and I got hungry for eggs (if you've seen the movie it makes more sense), so we sat around and chatted and ate scrambled eggs instead. He bussed it home, and Tynan and I watched the end of the movie with my drunk father, having come home from a Christmas party of sorts, who loves old movies.

Christmas Eve I got up at 7am, exhausted, and worked from 9am till 4pm or something. Of course, it was crazy. Everybody decided that they all needed to buy Christmas Blend at the last possible moment, and we sold out early in the morning. I was happy to get out of there. I came home, changed, packed, and we drove out to Langley. Hung out with my mom's side of the family. We ate hors d'ouvres and chatted, and I, being exhausted, just listened. I think Tynan was bored. Understandably so. I drank lots of tea, which perked me up a bit. We opened presents. From my Auntie Maureen I got a (very beautiful) Chinese tea set, a travel bag for toiletries, and this book, Wild Swans, about women growing up in China spanning from about 1910 till 1978. I've already started reading it, and it's quite fascinating, though of course isn't pro-communist. I haven't reached the Cultural Revolution yet... people tend to be favourable of the revolution up until the Great Leap Forward. My grandparents gave me a shawl, money to buy a bus pass, and Red China Blues. The last one was a sort of unknowing provocation, since the book is hailed by all kinds of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois critics as a story of this Maoist Chinese-Canadian woman who goes to China and sees the "ills" of communism, becoming alienated and disillusioned. Coming to terms with the so-called death of communism. Or so I've heard. I've had it recommended it to me by many different politically rotten people because I'm interested in communism, China, and Chinese culture. The author, Jan Wong, writes for the Globe and Mail, or some other conservative Canadian newspaper. My Uncle Jim and his girlfriend Cheryl gave me a Fantasia 2000 video (I was happy about that), and some warm gloves that coincidentally perfectly matched the shawl my grandmother had given me. Tynan got a black scarf and a CD carrying case from me, a keychain maglite (which he loves) from my grandma, and this weird brushy thing used to clean electronic equipment and a gift certificate from Sam the Record Man from my mom. Tynan and Peter (my Aunt's boyfriend who once was horrified when I said Canadian history was boring) got into a semi-serious political discussion. Peter's a liberal. I drank tea and tuned out. I'm not into discussing politics with my relatives. I mean, now I'd probably say that Canadian history was a long period of genocide and pillaging, but that wouldn't go over too well.

After that, my parents drove Tynan and I to his house. Some of Tynan's relatives were over, so we talked to them a bit. We opened our presents. Tynan's mom (Gail) gave me this framed picture of a bird with Chinese characters that say "from music springs the world," and below that it says it in both English and French. (De la musique jallit le monde.) And a toothbrush and toothpaste and dental floss and toothpicks. Tynan's dad (Helmut) is a dentist. It was pretty much a given that Tynan was getting me CDs, but what he ended up getting me was a pleasant surprise. Long ago, in the summertime, we'd gone to MusicWorld at Lougheed Mall and I'd fallen upon this Matador compilation that was too expensive so I didn't buy it, and then I forgot about it. He bought me that, and this crazy experimental noise album that Mike Patton did called Adult Themes for Voice. It's hilarious. I've only listened to about half of it so far, but it's kind of similar to the Fantomas album in style, but it's all just his voice using different effects. It's good. And the Matador compilation is like a reference guide for indie kids. Très bon. We went to bed shortly after that. I was soo tired.

Christmas. We woke up at like, noon. Ate yummy yummy porridge (I love porridge, and Gail's an amazing cook... her porridge has all these crazy grains in it), and were sent on a mission to find oregano. It being Christmas, everything was closed. For some reason, I thought there would probably be oregano at Sev, so we hopped into Tynan's mom's SUV and headed out. There's this thing with Tynan and driving: he has a terrible sense of direction and gets distracted much too easily. We got pretty lost on the way there, and I was no help since I don't know anything about Langley, but we eventually got there. But not before a brief encounter with the hand of death. We were driving along this two-lane road and this van in front of us was going really really slow, and we didn't know why. (Turned out it was preparing to turn left.) So Tynan went into the other lane to pass the guy, and we almost had a head-on collision with a car coming the opposite way. "Tynan!" I yelled. Agh. I probably should've been more scared than I was. My heart didn't even speed up or anything. So anyway. Sev. I bought cigarettes for Tynan's mom with a little harassment from the lady behind the counter since I didn't have adequate photo ID, and, realizing there was no oregano (and that I was on crack for thinking that in the first place), we left. Plan B was to go to a neighbour's house. An hour later, we'd returned.

Relatives started arriving. Tynan's mom has eight brothers and sisters, and their entire family is Catholic except Tynan's parents, who are atheists. And their whole family is on crack. So when it was realized there wasn't any juice, we jumped up and drove back out to Sev to buy some. And then decided to go to the video store. We rented Red Sorghum and Shadow of a Doubt. When we returned, everyone was freaking out because we'd been gone so long, but may I stress again that they're all on crack, and they hardly needed to be worried. It was like, a half an hour longer. So we sat and socialized with the relatives. Tynan's grandmother bought me this tiny ceramic jewel case with yellow roses on it that said Harrison Hot Springs, BC. Crack. Ah well. I thanked her politely. I sat at the kitchen table eating chocolate, talking to Tynan's cousin Elena who's going to university in Winnipeg. It's incomprehensibly cold there. She says your eyelids can freeze shut. There were like, 30 people there, so it was continuous mayhem. It was cool when Tynan's aunt Camille showed up with a Japanese exchange student who'd been staying at her house. She was 18, her name was Tomomi, she was from Tokyo, and she spoke about as much English as I can speak Chinese. Actually, probably more than that. She was really sweet, and we felt bad for the fact that she'd travelled here all the way from Japan, and she was studying English at Kwantlen, which isn't even half as bad as the fact that she was staying in Surrey. I played her the Pizzicato Five songs that were on my Matador compilation, which seemed to make her happy. And we took her for a walk around the neighborhood to look at the Christmas lights, and she took pictures of us with her supercool polaroid camera. Japanese technology is cool. So she, with the combination of Absolut Citron mixed with OJ, Tynan's hilarious little 3-year-old cousin Xavier (who looks like a little brown version of Tynan), chocolate, and Elena, made the evening tolerable. When people started leaving, we sat down and watched Shadow of a Doubt. I don't remember it that well because I was drunk, but the filming was much more interesting than the plot. That's one thing I don't totally understand about old movies. Why do they have to be so boring sometimes? I know Rebel Without a Cause is supposed to be one of the best movies ever made, but I didn't get it. Maybe I'm just dull and uncultured.

I drank lots of water while we watched that and Red Sorghum, which was also somewhat of a disappointment. There were cool things about it, but it was kind of boring sometimes. Gong Li is awesome, though. I should put her up on my icons page. It was pretty late when that was done, so we went upstairs and had amazing sex for about an hour and then went to sleep. Tynan's bed is bigger in Langley. It was fun.

We slept in even later on Boxing Day, and drove out to Vancouver because Tynan wanted CDs and I wanted shoes. We parked at Broadway Station in the Safeway parking lot and took the Skytrain because we figured parking would be nuts. The mall was crazy as it was. We looked at shoes in Holt Renfrew, but they were just too expensive. I bought these rad Steve Maddens at Sterling instead. Futuristic-looking, square-toed, gum-soled, creamy beige leather runners. A good score. Tynan bought CDs at Sam the Record Man and HMV. John Coltrane's Live in Seattle, and this album whose name I forget. I like it... it's just him and his drummer, Rashid Ali (probably a gross misspelling), who played with him until Coltrane died. Sparse but still crazy. I don't like most of his other later free jazz because there's too much going on at once and I don't understand it. Not that I claim to be a jazz expert. Most all of my jazz knowledge stems from Tynan.

Tynan drove me home, and we were gonna have dinner but neither of us was hungry. We listened to his purchased CDs and a bit of Adult Themes for Voice, and I opened my presents from my parents. I got a bunch of money, a tofu cookbook (if you're a vegetarian, and particularly if you're a female vegetarian, I'm sure you can relate with the fact that people are always buying you vegetarian cookbooks), a ring from Bali, nice shampoo, and a wall calendar of cool photomontages. And chocolate. They were in Singapore and Bali until the 18th, and didn't have much time to Christmas shop, so I was cool with getting lots of money. Tynan didn't stay for long. I watched Star Trek: the Next Generation (probably the one thing I've had time to do lots of), ate leftovers from my missed Christmas dinner with my dad's side of the family (oh right, one of my aunts on that side got me a gift certificate and some Christmas ornaments, always a tradition), and went to bed and read Wild Swans.

The next morning I had to wake up and go do political work. Well, it wasn't really morning. I've been going to bed later and getting up later. After that, Tynan and I went to see Quills, this movie about Marquis de Sade starring Kate Winslet, Geoffrey Rush and Joaquin Phoenix. I love Kate Winslet (she's so hot), we both have a mild appreciation for sado-masochism (and that's all I'll say), and we both wanted to see it. Unfortunately it was pretty disappointing. It had a lot of potential, but the further it progressed, the sillier and more far-fetched it got. We ran into Tynan's friend Schmul afterwards, who described it was "heavy-handed." An accurate description. Ah yes, and we went to see it at Tinseltown. We ate dinner in the food court, and there's this cool shoe store right beside it, and we went in and I bought some cool bright blue Guess runners very similar to my wearing-out green New Balance runners. Perhaps I'm developing a fetish. Catching the shoe bug. I know that Larissa has started really drooling over shoes... when I went Christmas shopping, we had a look in every shoe store we passed, as therapy from the stresses of Christmas shopping. Aren't girls silly?

Tynan drove me home again. He had to call his friend Noel in Langley because they were gonna hang out, and he ended up inviting me out there with him. We took a shower together and hopped back in the SUV to go to Langley. We only had to go back into my house twice because we forgot stuff. So we went to Noel's house, which is very very close to where my Uncle Dale and Aunt Cecile live. We sat in his room and listened to and played music for several hours. Hardcore and emo and jazz. Noel's a pretty cool kid. We see him at shows all the time. Tynan went to high school with him. I was bored, though. I stared at his walls a lot. I'm getting tired. I've been writing this entry for about an hour now. Anyway, Noel's was last night, and we slept at Tynan's in Langley, went to bed around three or four, got up at 1 this afternoon. Tynan drove me to the Skytrain station, and I went to Metrotown and bought jeans at Club Monaco and a notebook at Plenty. Both on sale. Came home, ate, watched TV, read more of Wild Swans.

C'est tout.