Big City Death

Be grateful.
Be very grateful that instead of working on one of my two essays, or my drawing project, or my typography project, I'm instead updating this blog. 
I know, I know. I've missed you too. It's been months since I last saw you! How are you? How's the foot doing? Did you get that weird rash checked out?
Seriously though, it's kind of nice to be writing for something other than school. In case you didn't know (and you probably didn't), I'm back in Canada and attending a rather prestigious art school. Now before you judge me and my decisions, I would like you to keep this image in mind: 

Does this help?

Ok, that may not have worked in my favour, but in my defence, my sticks were hung from a free-standing structure. Either way, I'm studying advertising and it's turning out to be a pretty interesting ride so far. I won't go into intricate details of how much work I have (A LOT) and which classes suck (a few) so as not to offend anyone, but I will say that I'm somehow managing to keep up.

In other news, I am now also a Toronto resident. Yes sir. Exciting as the big city life is, it can sometimes get you down - it's really hard to find a seat at Starbucks sometimes. Also, I constantly feel boxed in and don't even get me started on public transit. I thought small town Canada was weird but nothing compares to Toronto weird; but alas, that's a blog post in itself.

When shit gets real

Ah, Zambia. Gotta love it.

Oh well, it's home.

Have you ever felt like you were single-handedly fighting the entire army of the forces of stupidity? No? Well I have.

After my phone got stolen about a week ago (don’t ask), I drove to our town’s central police station to file a report. I guess I should be grateful that I managed to find the central police station seeing as how it’s located in the armpit of the city, but that’s a very small consolation.

I managed to file half the report before the officer taking down the details (Sidenote: this officer happened to be in possession of a very large and very old AK-47 rifle) asked for my phone’s IMEI number. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have my phone’s IMEI tattooed on my leg, so I told the officer I would be back with the information needed.

True to my word, I returned about an hour later (this time with my father), phone’s IMEI in tow and ready to nail the piece of shit who had stolen my poor baby right from under my nose. The officer who I had talked to first was no longer there. In his place were two other officers: a man and a woman who looked like they may or may not have had a combined IQ of 95.

With a deep breath, I explained that I had come in earlier to file a report and had now returned with my phone’s IMEI, a crucial piece of information needed to track my phone down. The woman officer listened to my explanation with a vacant expression before proceeding to flip through a gigantic book. After about three solid minutes of searching, she finally found my name next to an entry. At this point, she once again asked me what I had brought in. I told her it was my phone’s IMEI number.

You know what she said then? I wish I were actually talking to you right now so you could take a wild guess. Go ahead. Try and guess.

…

Before I go on, let me remind you that this is a FUCKING (supposedly) TRAINED POLICE WOMAN working at the FUCKING LARGEST POLICE STATION IN THE CITY. And you know what she says?

“There’s no space to write down the number.”

I’m sorry? I didn’t catch that. What did you just say?

“There’s no space left in the entry to write down the number.” She says this without looking up at me or my father. Instead, she’s looking at the book and speaking with a tone that says “Oh well. Tough luck assholes. There’s no space!”

My reaction: ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?!!

I honestly didn’t know what to say. Imagine you’re running late for an international flight and you jump into a cab. You’re stressed and you ask the cabby to drive you to the airport, but instead of starting the car, he says he hasn’t put his key in the ignition. In fact, his key is still in his pocket. And shit, we all know how fucking hard it is to solve that problem, right? You might as well start rescheduling your 11 a.m. meeting.

So there I am, confronted by the issue of someone stealing my phone and this bitch is talking about how there is no space in a book to write down a number, the one thing they need to recover my stolen phone. Do you understand how frustrating that is?

I was screaming profanities inside my head so vile they could melt her face off, but on the outside I asked her if she couldn’t write it down in a separate entry.

Her reply was no. Why? Because that would be a duplication of entries.

Please don’t attempt to understand, dear reader. Even I don’t want to go into all the possible solutions to this problem. I feel my IQ dropping as I write this…

Then, as if to prove her point, she tells us to come and see for ourselves that there’s no space. At this point I was ready to pass out from severe moronic interaction syndrome (MIS).

“So what do we do now?” I asked her, my eyes glazing over from the overwhelming amount of WTF I was experiencing.

Her reply? Come back tomorrow and talk to the officer who wrote down your entry. She didn’t offer any other assistance, nor did she seem like she wanted to. In her mind, she was doing us a favour by just talking to us.

That was when I lost it. Yes, dear reader. I lost it for real this time and not just in my imagination. I yelled at her and asked why in the blue fuck I had to come see a specific officer at a specific time to complete a task a five year old could do in less than a minute. Was this a brothel? Was my favourite prostitute on vacation and the new one just didn’t cut it? No, this was a police station. A police station in Zambia, true, but a police station nonetheless. The police were supposed to work as a unit (preferably trained) and it wasn’t supposed to matter who I talked to, or when I talked to them. It wasn’t any of my concern who wrote what and where, it was just supposed to fucking work.

After I had my outburst, everyone just stared at me – but they still didn’t do anything.

Although my phone was found a week later, the part of my brain that died in that dingy police station remains dead. I’m sad to say I am disgusted by the incompetence and apathy I have experience at the hands of the police. I have never had much faith in them anyway, but I thought that at least when I talked to an officer, I would be talking to a trained officer and not a high school dropout who failed at English and common sense.

If parts of this don’t make sense to you, I understand. This story has more layers than an onion and I’ve just given you the bare basics. I used to be scared of having something stolen because of its value, but now I’m just scared because I’ll have to talk to the police.

Potty for Pothead Potter

Dear readers (whoever you are),

You have my sincerest apologies for my continued absence. You see, I just haven’t had the time to sit down and ramble about something on paper as I have been extremely busy.

Yours,

Anton.

...

Okay, that’s bullshit. I’ve just been a little too lazy to write. Don’t blame me, I’ve had other stuff on my mind. Good news is, I’m back! Yay! And boy, do I have a lot to say.

Right now I’m in Lusaka – that’s the capital of Zambia for those of you who may be unfamiliar – and I just saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2. I won’t get into the minor details of Zambia only having one major cinema for the entire country that is (in)conveniently located in Lusaka. I will say, however, that Zambia’s Ster Kinekor Cinema was the highest grossing Ster Kinekor Cinema in Africa. Or was it southern Africa? Either way, I’m not surprised. When you force an entire nation to attend one movie theatre, profits there are more than likely to go up.

Anyway, back to Harry Potter. 

Above: The best thing since Facebook.

It was without a doubt the most amazing movie I have seen this year. Argue all you want, but I spent every second of it on the edge of my seat, either yelling triumphantly at the screen or slinking back and shedding a quiet tear. All in all, it was extremely moving. 

I also saw Transformers 3, a movie whose foundations are a super-sexy model and cars that transform into robots that explode and shit. To sum that up in two words – ass and explosions. Three words if you throw in predictability.

Am I being excessively scathing? Well boo-fucking-hoo, I don’t give a shit.

Now, on to Lusaka. It’s a love-hate relationship we have. It appears that certain people who live in Lusaka labour under the delusion that they are better than everyone living in not-Lusaka. I’ll be fucked if I know why; it’s probably because they have the aforementioned one functioning cinema in the entire country, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Lusaka isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s dusty, it smells funny and it has its own line of terrible television channels that it thinks the rest of the country wants, but actually doesn’t (MuviTv, I’m looking at you).

Despite all its shortcomings (and believe me, it has many), Lusaka still has a special place in my heart. I mean, it has an international airport for starters. I need that to get into the country. And it has the one cinema; I wouldn’t be able to watch Harry Potter without it. Oh right, some of my friends live there. That’s a plus, right?

At the end of the day, it’s part of my home, and I love all parts of home equally. Also, I don’t wanna piss Lusaka off yet – I have to use its airport in about a month.

How to maintain what's left of your dignity on Facebook

Let's talk about Facebook.

By now, I'm sure most of us can't live without it, and if you can, there's something wrong. Of all the times I've mentioned Facebook in a conversation, only twice have I heard the phrase "I don't have Facebook." (I slapped the speaker of those words both times)
Joking aside though, this isn't about why everyone should have Facebook. It's about all the little things people do on Facebook that drive me crazy. For example:

1. LIKING YOUR OWN POSTS: 

Come on guys, this one is a no-brainer. Doesn't having an entire page devoted to you and you alone give you enough of an ego boost? Why on earth would anyone like their own post? If you posted it, it comes without saying that you already "Like" it. If you didn't, you wouldn't have posted it in the first place. Logic.

2. 10,000 PHOTOS: 

So you just spent the last three hours of your life taking pictures of yourself in a mirror. You made some faces, you used some "cool" effects and you made sure the toilet behind you was flushed. Now that you have 246 photos of yourself taken by yourself, it would be absolutely insane not to post them on Facebook, right? WRONG. In this particular case, sharing is not caring. Don't punish your friends with your face featuring an infinite number of expressions from infinite angles. And don't pout either; it's very MySpace.

3. FARMVILLE: 

Lord, I can't begin to describe the pain that moronic game has caused me. I once fell victim to its not-so-distant cousin, Cityville. I'll tell you right now that it was a monumental waste of time. The only thing worse than Zynga Facebook games are the requests you get from friends who play them. They pop up on your page every other day, talking about "lost cow" this and "chicken shit" that and "I need fertilizer or my crops will die!!" Guess what? I don't give a shit! Go and tend to a real fucking plant. Or even better, go out and talk to actual human beings. I can't believe people pay money for that crap.

4. THE EVER CHANGING RELATIONSHIP STATUS:

Some relationships are rocky - trust me, I get it. We all break up and move on. What we all don't do, however, is change our relationship status after every fight/breakup. It's not so much annoying as it is disconcerting to see someone bounce from "Single" to "It's Complicated" to "In a Relationship" every other week. Should we be worried?

5. HAVING 8,000 FRIENDS: 

No, I'm not jealous of people who have more Facebook friends than I do. I just don't understand it. Eight thousand people? That's the population of a small town. Ninety nine point nine per cent of people with that many Facebook friends haven't met at least 60 per cent of them. Ok, I just made that statistic up, but it's probably true. And that brings me to...

6. ADDING PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW: 

Now this is annoying. Every once in a while, I get a friend request from a person my eyes have never had the displeasure of seeing. Just because we have a mutual friend, doesn't mean you can hit the "Add Friend" button. 

"Hi, let's be friends" is the message that sometimes comes with the request. You're kidding me, right? I don't care if we live in the same town or if you know my friend's aunt's brother's sister-in-law. NO. And by the way, re-adding someone as a friend after they've turned you down? Err... think about it.

7. POOR GRAMMAR/SPELLING:

No, I don't care that it's the Internet. Try to write like you have a brain and were taught how to speak English at some point in your life. Facebook is good for many things, but proper grammar isn't one of them. And neither is proper spelling. 

"Wat did u guyz do lst nyt?" 

Seriously? Would it kill you to type in an extra letter? For Pete's sake, S is right next to Z on a QWERTY keypad, and it takes just as many presses to type an S as it does to type a Z on a numerical keypad. Grow up.

8. HOURLY STATUS UPDATES: 

I honestly don't give two shits about what you had for lunch today, unless you ate that lunch with Bar Rafaeli or Ban Ki Moon (in that case I'd expect a photo). But telling the world your every move? No.That's what Twitter is for.

9. FACEBOOK CHAIN MAIL:

If you're dumb enough to believe that Mark Zuckerberg personally messaged you and asked that you forward his message to prove that your account is active and urge others to do the same or else Facebook will shut down, then you don't deserve to be on Facebook. That is all.

10. CRYPTIC POSTS: 

You know what I'm talking about: the cryptically ambiguous status updates that may or may not be about your (ex) lover/crush/sex master. 

"I'm tired of being treated like second-best." 

By who? If you're that pissed about it, write it on the perpetrator's wall instead of leaving it hanging there hoping your lover/crush/sex master will read it and get the hint. Because, guess what? He/she/it probably won't. Listen to the voice of experience.

And that, dear readers, is that. I don't want you to be an upstanding member of the Facebook society just to improve your sex/love/work life (and possibly, reputation). I wan't you to become an upstanding member of the Facebook society so I don't have to cringe whenever I see one of your misdeeds.

Vampires. You know the drill.

I love vampires. Really, I do. I love how fast they are, I love how they have super-hearing, and I love that they are always attractive. I have that last part covered though.
What amazes me is how people are still interested in them. After everything Twilight has done to vampires, and after all the exposure they have received, it's amazing people still bother. I guess vampires are kind of like Rolling in the Deep - refer to my previous blog post.
When I was 10 years old, the word vampire would conjure up pictures of coffins, death, blood and evil. Now when I hear vampire, I think of Edward Cullen. 

Scary in a different way.

When I see a movie or TV show title with vampires involved, I automatically assume it revolves around a love story, usually between a human and said vampire.
The woman is usually the human one (cue analysis of sexism in vampire fiction) and the male vampire resists his evil, carnal urges to suck her dry because they fall deeply in love. But because they are deeply in love, she is exposed to all the dangers that obviously accompany a relationship with a blood-sucking, undead, mythological beast. However, love prevails, and through many trials and tribulations and attempted murders, the unlikely couple emerge at the other end a little shaken up, but all in all, better than they were before they started.
That's usually how it goes. Oh, and there are usually other supernatural beings involved. I'm sorry if I just ruined a number of vampire novels for you. You'll thank me later.
The first vampire novel I read was Twilight. I'll admit it had me hooked. I read non-stop, I dared not bend a page of the sacred book and I even picked a side (Team Edward, if you're wondering). Then when it all came to an end, I stepped back and looked at the entire series without the haze of vampire love clouding my eyes. It was then that I realized vampires had been ruined. I was never going to look at them the same again. No longer were they the creatures that occasionally haunted my illicit drea- err... I mean, nightmares. I thought I'd never be scared of vampires again. 
Before any real vampires decide to instill the fear in me once again, I'll have you know that I was saved by my author-god Stephen King's novel, Salem's Lot. After I read that masterpiece, all was right in the world again.
The moral of the story? 21st century vampires suck, pun intended. Still, I'll admit it'd be nice to be one. Of course, I'd go on the "vegetarian" diet, as Stephanie Meyer so elegantly put it. Or maybe I'd try some friends. We'll see. But just in case, hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband 'cause they suckin' er'body out here.
Wait, that sounds wrong...

Rolling in the Deep. Seriously?

Ok, so you know how every year there's one album and one song that just won't leave the spotlight? No matter what the Hollywood machine throws at it, that one little album holds on to its 15 minutes like a cat that's just dug its claws into your arm. This year, that album seems to be Adele's '21'.

The album cover doesn't quite convey how I feel right now.

Don't get me wrong, I think the album is fantastic. I love(d) the songs, I love Adele. But seriously, I think it's time we gave it a rest. How many times am I going to have to hear 'Rolling In The Deep' every time I turn on my TV? (Here's one more time for good measure)

How long is that very song going to be playing in one of those hip stores all the kids love to go? I don't know. All I know is enough is enough.
I don't know about you, but excessive song playing eventually ruins the song for me. If I hear it enough times I start to hate it. It kinda goes like this:


1st time: Meh, what's special about this?
4th time: Ok, this song is kinda cool.
6th time: I freaking LOVE this song!
18th time: Hey, it's an old favourite of mine! Don't change the channel!
30th time: Yeah, it's cool. Skip ahead though.
50th time: Again??
70th time: Turn that shit off already!
98th time: Seriously? I'm gonna fucking break that CD, bitch!


So that's basically the life cycle of a song. Keep in mind this doesn't all happen in a short amount of time; it takes weeks. Right now, Rolling In The Deep is somewhere between the 50th and 70th marks. Lady GaGa's Born This Way is between 30 and 50, just to give you a better perspective. I love the women, I really do. But haven't you ever heard "Too much of a good thing is bad?" Even though it may not apply to awesome stuff like ice-cream and cake and money and s... yeah those things, it definitely applies to music.
To make a long story short, please quit playing the same shit over and over again. We can only take so much before our brains start to leak out of our ears like guava puree, and I'm too young to die.

Ma-ma-malaria

Nothing feels better than finding out SOMEONE reads your gibberish. It is for that same reason that I am back today. Woohoo! I know you missed me, but I’ll skip the pleasantries and get right down to business.

Let’s start with the basics – I’m in Zambia! I survived my flight (didn’t get to sit next to anyone hot), survived my initial Canadian withdrawal symptoms, and survived a little get-together my parents threw for me. I’m a survivor. Unfortunately, I have another item on my list that I need to survive: malaria.

If you’re not from sub-Saharan Africa, you probably think malaria is BAD. Like “OMFG I THINK I’M GONNA DIE!” bad. Hate to break it to you, but it’s really not. Well, it is deadly but then again so is the common cold in rare situations. With the right treatment, I expect to be up and running in no time.

Now that you know I’m not gonna die (even though that might be a little disappointing for some), let’s move on. There are bigger problems here than malaria.

First? Zambian internet. I know it’s not terrible EVERYWHERE, but I am yet to see an internet connection functioning normally. It’s like ghosts – they probably exist but very few people have seen them, and those that have aren’t usually taken too seriously.

Two ISPs came down to “assess” how well an internet connection would work at my house, and the results were abysmal. And before you ask, no, we don’t live in the middle of nowhere. Just a regular old residential area in a regular old town. But apparently, their base stations are either too far, blocked by too many objects, or facing the opposite direction. Once again before you ask, no, apparently we don’t have cable here.

Secondly? Zambian air. Or rather, the air at my house. I don’t know what’s in it besides the usual oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases, but it’s giving me allergies. Every night before bed, my nose runs like a leaky faucet, and no matter how soft the Kleenex claims to be, my nose still gets irritated from the constant wiping and blowing. It’s not pleasant. Not at all. Maybe it's the cat...

But besides everything that’s so obviously going wrong, I’m glad to be home. I’m more than happy to see my parents, my friends, and even my dad’s annoying secretary… Ok, I lied. I’m not happy to see her. But you get my point.

By the way, a little piece of advice: don’t fly Ethiopian. They may be cheap, but you find out why as soon as you get on the plane. Honestly, Air Canada wasn’t that great either, and they’re not even cheap. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Ok, think I’m done ranting. I shall now retire to my comfortable bed and medicate my ailing body while sipping on a nice cup of tea. Yes, I think that sounds about right…