Today, My Heart Swings

in the meantime

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 13:58:00 +0000

so what else have i been up to, then?

we're a bit a ways from it now, but christmas was....fine? definitely better than last year's shitshow of depression, anyway. 2018's holiday-time success may have had a lot to do with the fact that i wasn't home for long; i got to kingston late on the night of the 23rd, then was driven back(!) early on the 27th. the shorter stay time is key.

ah, my mother pulled out one of my dumbest pieces of childhood art for the holidays (it’s a....checkerboard, I guess? For ants?) pic.twitter.com/lTwAkoNvZ4
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) December 24, 2018

it was a quick visit and a good christmas (the last family christmas that will be spent fully with this generation - my youngest stepbrother and his wife are expecting now, with the baby showing up around june this year), with enough sephora gift cards to buy me like half the store. it's all i ever really want.

but yeah, mega bonus that will probably never happen again: my mom and stepdad were en route to visiting friends just outside of toronto, so they actually gave me a ride back. because i wouldn't have to navigate train/bus/toronto transit with christmas gifts, that meant i was finally able to ask for some bigger, bulkier things (ie. a bed comforter set; a six-pack of beer from the craft brewery near the island). also, there's a weird sense of pride when your parents see your apartment for the first time and comment favourably on how much space you have. (they also tell you to never move out, which has always been the plan anyway)

from there i had a day's break, then i had to repack all my stuff and head over to housesit/catsit the fancy beast for a few days:

be warned, this is a trap.

as always, though, not a hardship to stay here for a few days:

so since the new year started, it's been a lot of sequestering myself away at home and uhhhhhhhh keeping myself occupied? a notable thing about having all this free time + a chromecast + a new unlimited internet data package is that i've finally been able to catch up on my netflix, both movies and tv series. yes, even old shit that came out in like 2016 that i wasn't able to watch. quick hits on what i've watched so far and have truly enjoyed:

defenders: quick lightweight watch, not truly as bad as everyone said it was but i'm always here for unconventional hero team-ups and also angst-ridden matt. could have done more with a lot of things but such is the constraints of netflix/serialized tv, i guess.

daredevil season 3: super fucking good to the point where i'm still super fucking mad they cancelled this series.

the punisher: i only caught up with this one last month (on the recommendation of emma, who loves ben barnes as much as i do) and was really glad i did, especially since season 2 is out next friday. it's a bit unrelentingly dark and violent, but what would you expect.

everyone should watch that Dorian Gray movie btw pic.twitter.com/ZrrBYTwOKS
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) December 30, 2018

(this happened btw)

train to busan: probably one of the best zombie movies i've ever seen. i was late watching this one - it's one of the highest grossing domestic films at the box office in south korea - but holy shit. again with the unrelenting.

bodyguard: i felt about this one like i did about defenders - it was a bit lightweight and more could have been done, but i thoroughly enjoyed the watchthrough, the soundtrack was fantastic, and when they hit the mark on the suspense they really hit it. also, richard madden is a total fox.

cam: awesome thriller, creepy af, and sex-worker positive, so well done on the whole. some scenes from this one still haunt me a little bit.

terrace house: the only season i've watched so far is the most recent (opening new doors) but oh man, am i hooked. it's basically a japanese reality show where six young people live in a house together and....nothing really happens. but at the same time, it's endlessly entertaining and weirdly soothing. perfect long afternoon binge-watch.

babylon berlin: i just started watching this one last week and killed all 17 episodes of the first season within three days. a detective mystery/thriller that takes place in 1929 berlin and it's just fucking excellent. but do yourself a favour and watch it in the original german with english subtitles - the english dub is atrocious. (also i've been reading the translation of the book it's based on and the show was a huge improvement??) give me season 2 already, netflix!

so that's the binge-watching, either by myself or happily ensconsced with friends as we all watch together. otherwise, my free time is currently being taken up by job searching, reading my way through my insane pile of books, drinking my way through my insane collection of tea, working my ass off on my written/spoken german comprehension, getting to the gym a bunch of times a week, and taking long walks while listening to music. such is life.

here's my current obsession. enjoy!

[ music | none ]

are you ready

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 15:07:00 +0000

yeah, so, i'd be remiss if i didn't devote a whole blog post to explaining my plans for june this year:

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🛫
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jan 2, 2019 at 5:07pm PST

it's as simple as what you'd expect: what i've been talking about and preparing for since 2017 is finally getting underway. rammstein's touring europe from may til august.

in case you don't follow me on twitter and have missed my excited ramblings/updates about this, the new album (their first since 2009!) is apparently coming out in april, and our good german metal dads are embarking on a summer stadium tour across europe. all this was announced back in october, with the fanclub presale happening literally, like, less than a week later.

smash cut to a bleary-eyed me getting up at 4 a.m. to log on to the european ticket site the very second they went on sale (at a respectable 10 a.m. germany time, mind you).

not that this was an easy process; for some reason, the ticket website absolutely refused to accept my credit card, and even though i kept trying and trying, the website eventually dumped me out and released all my tickets. but i wasn't going to give up that easily, and somehow - somehow - i finally managed to eke out a decent ticket for the berlin concert, which was my #1 priority. but i didn't want to make the trip to go to just one concert, which lead to me also wading back into the fray to secure a ticket for copenhagen as well, which is scheduled for a few days before berlin.

however, i was unaware that, due to these being shows at football stadiums, paying a premium doesn't get you front row space - it gets you seats. i mean, probably good seats, but still - seats?? i didn't want to be fucking seated for these shows. so it may have been too late to go back and course-correct berlin and copenhagen, but i was determined to at least get one show where i could elbow my way to front row, my favourite place in the world. and that's how i ended up with a ticket to their show in rotterdam. i at least got standing for that, thank god.

I followed bands across the country for years in my late teens and early twenties. I have TRAINED for this. (IT WASN'T A PHASE, MOM)
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) November 2, 2018

so to sum up, here's where i'm heading and what i'm doing there:

june 16 - ostseestadion, rostock, germany
rostock was actually a ticket i got on a whim, but not really. for whatever reason, the rostock show is the one that like 20-30 members of the fanclub are all attending, and i was encouraged to come too. but one tiny thing stood in the way: tickets were sold out. (in fact, tickets for the majority of the tour sold out within hours of general sale.)

the good thing, though, was that every so often the ticketing site would release a few random extra tickets for sale for a few random concerts on the schedule. i was lucky enough to have one of fanclub members i met at the berlin meetup keeping an eye out for me, and one night he messaged me late to tell me that rostock tickets were available again. within minutes, i was going to my fourth concert on the tour. (i got standing room for this one too, an extra bonus!)

the other "fun" detail is that this is largely the german side of the fanclub attending, and i have no goddamn clue if my spoken german is going to be good enough. but considering how flattered i am that i was even invited, i'm gonna definitely try my hardest. (there's apparently going to be a meetup or party of some form in the days before or after the concert, so i'll be put to the test as the novelty canadian visitor for the tour, eeeeeeep) so, this is where i start: fly in to berlin, either i catch a ride with one of the other fanclub members or take the bus an hour north to rostock, and off we go.

june 19 - telia parken, copenhagen, denmark
everyone's been telling me that copenhagen is expensive as hell, so i plan on only staying here a couple nights and heading off to berlin as soon as i possibly can (also because that means more time in berlin!). also apparently it takes like five hours to get from rostock to copenhagen, but i gotta do it. i'm seated for this show too, sigh.

june 22 - olympiastadion, berlin, germany
this is it: the hometown show, essentially, and most likely the hottest ticket on the tour. honestly, i'm just so fucking grateful that i even managed to snag a ticket, especially given my troubles with the ticketing website. i'm going to likely be in berlin from june 20 to 24, and having this show right in the middle is perfect. also, although i bitch about the fact that i have a seated ticket for this one, it'll likely work in my favour - i won't have to line up at the venue at the crack of dawn, and i'll have time to hit up the rammsteinstore beforehand, if it's open. silver linings. and like i said, i am insanely thankful i'm going to this one. seeing rammstein play a concert at berlin's olympic stadium has always been the dream, and this is the one everyone wanted. (most of us were greedy and wanted two berlin shows - munich got two! - but no dice)

june 25 - de kuip, rotterdam, the netherlands
as i detailed in the saga of my grabbing tickets at 4 a.m., the rotterdam show was my original bonus show (before rostock happened, that is) simply because i wanted at least one show where i could be standing (ideally up front, where i belong). i had legit gone back to bed before thinking on it, deciding nope, fuck it, and getting back up and on the website to see where else i could go. rotterdam was the only logical choice, since rostock had already sold out at that point and i figured it'd be easy enough to stay a few extra days past berlin.

another long commute here - apparently it's like a seven-hour bus ride from berlin to rotterdam - but a quick flight is only doable if i end up with a big windfall of money between now and then. having to bus it will be far more likely, and possibly even a respite. after the insane whirlwind of berlin, i'll probably just sleep the whole way.

as for amsterdam, there isn't a rammstein concert taking place there, but it's going to be part of my trip anyway. for one, i'd rather fly back to toronto from amsterdam than rotterdam, and for two, i've always wanted to see amsterdam, and since it's right there, why not? my father raves about how much he loves that city, especially in the summer, and has already been loading me up with recommendations for sightseeing. true, i might actually be death walking at this point of my trip, but there's no reason to pass up one of the great cities.

i haven't mentioned paris here, because it's still an iffy pipe dream - there are two shows in paris, both of which are currently sold out (ticket resales start in march), taking place on june 28 and 29 at la défense arena. even if i did luck out with a ticket to one, it would mean staying additional time in europe, bringing my total trip length up to three weeks instead of just two. i may be saving up for this trip, but i'm not sure i have that much money. (the tickets themselves were expensive enough, and now i have to think about flight costs, airbnbs, bus/trains, food, booze, merch, and so on - and for three whole weeks? yikes)

yet "paris?" remains on my list because honestly? for me, seeing rammstein play paris may be an even bigger dream than seeing them play berlin. ever since i fell back in love with this band by watching the rammstein: paris concert film, i've wanted to see them play there. the french love them and i want to be a part of that, too.

regardless, i'm back in toronto by the end of the month, which is...uh, only the end of the first leg of their tour, actually. so what i'm saying is that there's an entirely good possibility that i get home, feel mopey with post-tour depression all of july, and end up heading back for the final leg in august (finland, norway, sweden, vienna). maybe i am insane? who knows! but probably. (also worth noting that apparently they're touring north america next year - they've said in interviews that they're going to be touring for the next three years straight - so this is definitely not the end of my plans)

honestly, this is nuts. i know it is. it's a hell of a trek to undertake by yourself, everything from the planning to the booking to actually getting out there and doing it alone. sure, i'm going to be meeting friends at all the shows - being an active member of the fanclub has really helped with recognition, plus like i said, the weird novelty of being a solo canadian who's making the trek - but the actual travelling-around-europe part, i'm doing on my own. and i'd like to think i'll be okay, since it's not like i'm a broke college student backpacking or anything, but overseas travel is still very new for me, especially in non-english countries. but, this is what i wanted - what i've wanted for two years now. time to put up or shut up (and the second option is not an option - i already have all four tickets in hand).

and for sure, there's going to be adventures. come on - it's me, back following a band on tour. it doesn't matter how old the band is or how old their general fanbase is - of course there's going to be adventures with me. it never follows far behind.

so that's the thing: the world is a little bit shit these days, and my strongest recommendation is that if you find something you love, something that truly brings you ridiculous joy, then you should do everything you can to follow that love. (unless it's like, murdering people. don't murder!!) you gotta do it unabashedly and unafraid of what people will think, and you have to do it for yourself. that's what i'm doing.

that's all! and june will be here before we know it. i'll definitely be giving periodic updates into how the trip planning is going, and you can bet there'll be a ton of recap posts afterwards. but for now, i need coffee.

[ music | none ]

it must be the weather

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 18:51:00 +0000

hey, would you look at that! i'm not dead after all.

see, one of the good things of being a writer with a personal blog (an increasing rarity these days, i know) is that you're not on deadline and you don't have an editor breathing down your neck for new content. it's fine! freedom! however, i understand that it's bad practice to uhhhhhhh not write, so here we are again. (rest assured that if i were to ever drop blogging entirely, i'd just delete this entire thing - leave no trace - so if it's still up that means i'll come back to it eventually)

in fairness to me, i only ever really take long hiatuses because sometimes i just don't have a lot to write about (or that i can write about publicly; take that however you want), or an absence gets kicked off when there's a lot of life upheaval and i just don't have the energy to write. life upheaval like losing my job. so, whatever.

but yeah, on that - funemployment remains what it is, and i'm getting by okay, although i'm discovering that it's not just a financial toll, but a mental and emotional one as well.

it's weird because, although i definitely welcome the respite and mostly prefer to be alone (i'm cool with it), it's easy as hell to backslide right into loneliness, you know? it's also that much harder when you don't have a regular routine to fill your days, especially when everyone else (ie. your friends with normal lives) seem to.

so although all the time off sounds ideal - and it is pretty great at first! - after a while, it starts getting both boring and lonely, and i don't like either of those scenarios. i don't like having to make an effort to find things to keep myself occupied. also, as i've mentioned before, i can easily be a triple-punch of lazy, unmotivated, and antisocial, which makes it a struggle to get out and beat the hell out of that loneliness. it's a process.

it's part of the reason why i'm back here writing, actually - i need something useful to do with my time in the afternoons. i'm a stupidly early riser, which means i tend to get everything done before noon, which...leaves the entire afternoon to myself. and you can only watch so much netflix. (plus i've read so, so many books.) i was complaining about this imbalance to my mother on new year's day, and said something like "i need to develop a hobby so i can get rid of this bored housewife syndrome." is it as easy as this? maybe!

anyway! i've got tons of stuff to catch up on, but i'm going to space it out between blog posts so i actually have more things to write about (hah). here's a shot of a sunset from when i was on the island at christmas.

p.s. i don't listen to new music really, because i'm typically very tired, but the mighty emigrate (aka the side project of rammstein's founder/lead guitarist) put out their third album back at the end of november and it was far and away my favourite release of the year. i've had the title track on repeat for ages now:

it is incredibly fucking good, the end. (also emigrate's songs are all in english, for those otherwise disinclined to listen to songs in german)

[ music | emigrate, "let's go" ]

girl's not grey

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 13:58:00 +0000

once again, it is my birthday today, and i wanted to do a quick sentimental post about something nice, namely: how grateful i am for the people who care about me.

here's the thing: i don't always have a lot of faith in people. maybe that makes me jaded and aloof sometimes, but on the flip side, it absolutely means that much more to me when people do follow through on what they say. people who say they care about me and are there for me when i need them - and who act on their promises - actually blow my mind a little bit, because i really never expect that much out of people, because i've been let down so many times that i just shrug and get used to it.

so it means a hell of a lot to me when those who care actually step up, and in the last twelve months, it's been insane to find how many genuinely good people are in my life. even my mother has commented, "you really have very good friends" and that's the long and short of it. this past year has been about realizing that i can trust people - certain people, anyway; it's always a learning process - to be there for me if and when i need them. and that in turn has definitely helped make me a better, more confident person.

adult friendships are something that can't be taken for granted; you still need each other, even with all the careers and the marriages and the kids and the mortgages. your friends are the people that make it all worthwhile. not to focus on the negative here, but there are always people who turn out to be selfish or flaky or just vampires that feed on your emotions and energy. the good thing about being an adult is that you can recognize who you fit with and who you don't, and you can more easily realize who's worth your time and attention.

and that works both ways! it's such a nice feeling when you realize that you are that to other people. it's rewarding as hell to know that you're valued by others. i know i probably sound like an alien here, but i didn't have a close-knit group of friends as a kid or a teenager, and i only really became a part of social groups in my twenties. even then, though, i was more ancillary; i was a friend that came along to things with other friends, the ones who were the nuclei of the social groups. so that is, i think, what the difference i'm feeling now is: for once, people want me around for me, not because i'm part and parcel with someone else.

so i've been thinking a lot on that lately, which is a good balance, because i'm also keeping in mind what i need to do for myself. because there's some stuff i need to separate from, and some things i need to re-prioritize, especially going into the next year. i need a clearer mind than the one i've been struggling with, and thankfully, my friends - the people that matter - have given me the stability to see things more clearly.

the one thought i kept coming back to the other week was: you shouldn't keep on being a supporting character and waiting around for things to happen to you. you should be out there being the main character of your own story.

and i'm aware that the only thing that's keeping me here right now is me. (you know i always need a reason to stay, because otherwise it's too easy for me to leave. and i spent so many sunny berlin mornings on the stadtbahn, leaning my head against the window, wondering what would ever be enough.)

so let's see what happens from here on, and we'll find out where my story is this time next year.

everything can change in an instant so trust your fucking heart.

[ music | eisbrecher, "verrückt" ]

autumn beds

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 18:24:00 +0000

october is finally here! and with it, oktoberfest:

i'd meant to go to the toronto celebration last year but didn't quite get around to it, so this year i made sure i was there, and thankfully emma had a spare ticket i could buy off her (the saturday-night ein prosit party was sold out). and honestly, for me, big dumb germany superfan, this festhalle party was tops. so many costumes! so much beer! (and yes, they had a traditional brass band playing polka.) did i have to stop myself from tacking on german words to my sentences because that's how my brain works now? sure.

caption says it all:

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Lewd
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 29, 2018 at 4:39pm PDT

(i do love me some spicy sausage, though, but someone really ought to have warned me that the hot mustard is no joke) the hot potato salad had a bit too many fennel seeds, but i will always scarf down so much german beige food. and i definitely got a laugenbretzel on the way out, although again, foiled by the incredibly hot mustard. 10/10 would still eat again.

i also had to take a photo of this backdrop for selfies, and man oh man did i cackle loudly:

rammstein has a song called "küss mich" and it's...sort of about kissing...but like...not where you'd think? uh, anyway.

so oktoberfest in toronto was a joy - you'd be surprised at how willing you are to dance at the front of the stage after three beers - and i lost track of how many times i gushed, "oh my god, this is adorable." i mean, i don't think i'd ever be taking the trip to munich for the real thing - munich's expensive, and oktoberfest there is overrun with tourists - but i would clearly go back to berlin for lichterfeste in october. it seems like a given that r+ is going out on tour next year, but on the off-chance that they don't, i'm definitely planning on making that trip. berlin in october, please yes.

prince's gate even reminds me of brandenburger tor, ugh my heart:

tangentially related: i'm currently obsessed with good german chocolate ritter sport. even more so if i can find one in its original german packaging.

but here and now, though, most people are focusing on the fact that it's a long weekend coming up; it's canadian thanksgiving this sunday, so everyone's getting time off and travel plans in place and so on. but me - and i think i mentioned this before, but whatever - i'm staying here in toronto, for what i'm pretty sure is my first-ever thanksgiving long weekend not spent in kingston. i'm serious - i thought on it, and i can't recall a single thanksgiving that i didn't go home for. thanksgiving's always been a part of it, but it's been more so because both my birthday (the 9th) and my father's birthday (the 11th) are around the holiday, so it's a "three birds with one stone" scenario.

this year, though, i dunno. i just don't really feel it. it's a lot of maneuvering and coordination to get me to and from the island where my mom and stepdad live, and i wouldn't even be there for very long, and it's too much money for me right now. also, my dad and stepmom are only just getting back from croatia & austria on the 6th, and they already told me that they're not planning on doing anything for thanksgiving sunday. so now hopefully i don't feel too bummed out to miss the family thanksgiving, and likewise my birthday, because left to my own devices i can't see myself actually doing anything on my birthday.

ooof, does that sound depressing? i hope it doesn't sound that depressing. i'm just one of those people who's never made that big of a deal of my own birthday, mostly because, as i noted above, i've always been home with my family on the actual day. and honestly, as you get older, it's not even that big a deal, you know? it's really what you make of it. if you want to declare a "birthday week" or whatever, fine, sure - then it's a deal. but if you're not that motivated to make it into a big goddamn day for yourself, then that's how it is. (i'm probably too jaded and burned from my youth and the majority of my friends flaking out from my birthday parties, come to think of it.)

so in reality, i'm likely going to spend my birthday doing very little, unless i decide to hit up the movies or grab a nice (yet cheap) lunch somewhere. i'm easy to please, and i like my own company. (also, straight up, i am poor, my guys. i don't have the cash to splash out on a day of good times for myself. at least i don't have - and have never had - expensive wants or needs.) but i can unequivocally say that a year ago, i didn't expect to be back here, sitting around my apartment in my pjs all day and searching for jobs to apply for. that's the thing about life, though - you gotta be ready to roll with the punches, whatever happens. dust yourself off and get back to it.

and with that, i'm continuing to get back to it. enjoy the first week of the best month!

[ music | afi, "girl's not grey" ]

close cover before striking

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 14:41:00 +0000

so i have good friends that do cool things that they invite me to, which is how i ended up at a ddp yoga workshop in guelph last saturday:

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DDP Yoga workshop with the man himself 💎
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 22, 2018 at 6:25am PDT

it's actually quite serendipitous that i'd been doing ddpy before; in fact, last time i was freelancing, i would regularly fill my morning hours with yoga workouts. so even though i was pretty out of practice, muscle memory is a hell of a thing, and i was at least able to remember many of the move sequences and how to brace my core properly. still, it was almost a full day of intense yoga and inspirational talks from ddp himself (he gave me a mini-lecture about self-confidence when i professed to being awkward taking selfies with people, hah), and it was an interesting way to spend a saturday out of town.

also the rural parts of guelph are quite pretty:

my mother would have loved it out there, but i was just happy to get back to civilization. give me the city, forever.

the major downside of pushing myself through a long yoga workout was that i was sick, and i've been sick for the better portion of the week. it's clearly a head cold i picked up on the stupid germ-tube airplane on the way back from berlin, but i haven't been able to shake it yet, especially combined with the fact that my lingering jet lag is still messing with my sleep. love to wake up at 3-4 a.m. pretty much every day! fuck me.

still, sickness and jet lag haven't been enough to keep me down - i was fortunate enough to be selected to take part in a customer survey downtown last week, and it turned out my recompense was a $50 gift card to best buy. me: "what do i need at best buy?....wait."

so all told, i got a google chromecast for $1.70, which was a wonderful little mood-booster for this poor cost-cutter. especially since i'd wanted one for months but never got around to buying one. one more thing off the list!

moreover, this purchase has opened the door to cutting back further on my utilities: i'm going to simply ditch my cable access altogether (i barely watch tv anyway) and instead bump up my internet data, then just stick to streaming netflix and wrestling online, broadcast straight to my giant-ass tv set. i'll even end up saving something like $20 per month, which is always a bonus, particularly when you consider how much time i'm online (and, like i said, how little i watch tv).

speaking of, we're definitely in the cost-cutting measures now that i'm still sorting out the funemployment. so i'm dumping my cable, i cancelled my patreon and app subscriptions (sorry everyone, i gotta look out for #1 for a while), i'm switching gym memberships as of next month (going from $58 a month to $15 a month), and just generally redoing my budgets so i'm not so panicky. sure, i'll be fine, but not immediately, so i'm taking the steps to ensure that i'm scaling back on the non-necessities. it's almost freeing, in a way.

i really do not regret this purchase, though:

The Völkerball special-edition photo book was a heavy-ass thing to bring back with me, but so worth it. pic.twitter.com/qxW6dpXl4S
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 17, 2018

it's beautiful - a well-packaged coffee table book full of photographs taken on the völkerball tour worldwide in the mid-2000's. i'd kinda given up hope of ever owning a copy - they were a limited run, and they're quite expensive on ebay - and i wasn't even sure i'd be able to find one at the store in berlin, but thankfully this single damaged copy was on sale. i don't even care that the back corner of the book is all fucked up, i'm just so pleased to own one. (even if, yes, it weighed the hell out of my suitcase coming back)

hnnnnnngggghhhh

also: hi, Schneider pic.twitter.com/N0Y1WWYUoX
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 24, 2018

handsome dads are handsome.

alright, that's enough - i'm off to get in one last dental cleaning before my benefits run out (i definitely already filled my painkiller prescription; my pms cramps are never any joke), and meet up with my friends a bit later. it's finally fall, the leaves are changing colour, and i always land on my feet.

[ music | rammstein, "was ich liebe (demo)" ]

down to the sea

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 13:08:00 +0000

so! here we are, getting towards the end of my first week of funemployment. i legit had to hit the ground running on this one; sure, i'm eligible to apply for employment insurance, but like i said before, i want to work, which means i'm applying for full-time jobs all the time. the goal is something full-time permanent, of course, but i still need to spend time thinking about the bigger picture.

does being unemployed mean i have more time to blog? well, i mean...sure, but it also means i have less money to do things with, which means i have less things to blog about. i suppose i can go far enough into my head that i can just write a bunch about introspective things, but i have to be in the right mood to get ~deep~. it's easier to do some shit like oh, i dunno, take off for germany and then write about that. physical experiences, y'know.

Though LRT reminded me of last Friday at Blackland, a German guy offered to buy me a shot and I asked for Jager, and he made a face: “That’s how I know you’re not from here. Only tourists drink Jager in Germany.”
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 18, 2018

("oh, so what do you drink here, then?" "we drink jack daniels.")

but! like i said, i'm sorting it out. it's worth mentioning it, but the last time i didn't have a job, i had a boyfriend, so at least i had a reason to clean myself up a few times a week and go be a part of the outside world. this time, i'm actually going to have to make the effort to be in society myself, and that might be tough? i dunno. it depends on how much motivation i have to put on pants, i guess.

but honestly, the rest of my situation is far from bad. i've got my health, i have a band that i love, i have all the cool coats and makeup i need (and it's weird how reassuring this is to me), i'm well-stocked with groceries and supplies, i have a network of awesome and supportive friends, and i can write. i'm comfortable. it could be so much worse, and i know i'm very lucky for it.

if anything, all this free time has been giving me plenty of time to work my way through flake's book:

i mentioned it on twitter, but it's almost surreal how much of it i...actually understand? or like, get the gist of, anyway. it's fair to say that attempting to read german in order to decipher rammstein tour stories is far more motivating than a textbook.

to go along with this, though, i'm still keeping up with my german lessons, this time more determined than ever (must! read book!!). it's interesting to note how much better my spoken pronounciation/accent has gotten after only four days in germany. (also, i absolutely found that it's true that you speak better the drunker you are.) it's a twisty language, but then again so is english, and anything can be improved upon. it's good to have a goal to work towards in the off-hours.

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I validated the HELL out of this 7-day transit pass.
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 18, 2018 at 7:23am PDT

in the meantime: cutting back on amenities, budgeting, spreadsheets, and getting back into the groove of surviving on my own. also, i may be a poor now, but you're damn right going to toronto oktoberfest here next weekend. sure, it's touristy and cheesy, but i miss berlin so much already, and i'll take any bit of the culture i can get. ich vermisse dich.

also: it's almost fall, which is guaranteed to put me in a good mood. best season ever. (my birthday is also officially less than three weeks away now, eeeep.) seeing the leaves change colour and feeling a chill in the air is my best cure for any malaise, and though it doesn't last too long here in toronto, it'll be enough to revive me even a little bit. get ready for plenty of instagrammed photos of fall foliage throughout the city, as well as outfit-of-the-day selfies of whatever fall coat-and-boots combo i'm wearing. like so, from last year:

anyway, i have a packed weekend coming up - ie. i will actually have things to blog about - so i'm going to take my leave now to start knocking tasks off my to-do list. no rest for the wicked, i swear.

[ music | florence + the machine, "big god" ]

better to burn out

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 13:06:00 +0000

yeah, so, here's the big bad news i got while i was away in germany: i lost my job.

technically, my entire team was let go (or the four of us in the toronto office, anyway), and that's all i'm going to say about the technicalities in a public forum. but i will note that it's surreal news to receive while you're six hours ahead and drinking with new friends in berlin's oldest beer garden. (bless all of you who replied to me with "who fires someone while they're on vacation??" i mean, there's never a good time to restructure your staff, but i guess on the bright side i will definitely never forget this trip?)

fortunately, i was still able to at least push the doom-and-gloom/panic aside and enjoy the last day and a half of my trip, because i knew that i would be coming home in an okay place. i've been here before; i know how to hit the ground running. i've got plenty of options to consider, and i just need to take some time to see how things shake out. but like, i know how to live like this. it's stressful as hell, sure, but i think i can manage it. for a while, anyway.

if anything, what i'm the most sad about is having to lose my team. i love those three women so much, and we were such a great unit together. it truly was one of the better teams i've worked with, and it's really just so disheartening to lose that. but that's also something valuable to take away - those connections, and moreover, those friendships. if you can leave a job and come away with actual friends outside the office, then that's a great thing.

but yeah, the shock and stress is still quite real, although i'm doing my best to reassure myself that things will work out for the best. i have options, good references, and a solid portfolio. and i want to work. i don't want to just trigger ei and live off that for a while. i want to get right back into doing great work again, and i want to meet new people, and i want to make new connections. it all has to be onwards and upwards, you know?

yet i randomly spotted this sign in the pankow borough the day after i got the news, and it did make me feel a bit better:

("the universe loves you and helps you!")

you just never really know where life's going to take you.

anyway! please don't worry about me, and please don't feel sorry for me. i have a great support system of friends and family, and i have always, always been good at taking care of myself. (though the tip jar is to your right if you want to ko-fi me a few bucks, haha) we'll see where my career takes me next.

[ music | rammstein, "ich tu dir weh" ]

i can't get laid in germany

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 15:20:00 +0000

(title's an in-joke, guys.)

so here's a bit of background, as a preamble before my trip recap: i had my first "germany phase" when i was 14-15, brought on by a combined love of rammstein and the anime weiß kreuz, which has huge german themes and language use. but back then, i never even considered going to germany someday. i just really liked the sound of the language - so much so that i took it in my first year of university, hoping that i'd get the hang of it. instead, a formal class did the opposite, and i did so poorly at it that i dropped the idea of seriously learning german.

but now here we are: twenty years later, i headed off to berlin alone to do the pilgrimage to the band that i fell back in love with.

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Making the pilgrimage at last. 🇨🇦 #YYZ 🛫.....🛬 #TXL 🇩🇪
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 11, 2018 at 2:09pm PDT

like, i get it. i get that it's weird. people love one direction, or the backstreet boys (they're back!), or even (still) justin bieber. they love harry potter and supernatural and sherlock and hell, even wrestling. but when you choose to stan for a german dance-metal band that reached its peak popularity in the late 90s/early 00s, it seems weird.

except this past weekend, it wasn't. not at all.

see, the thing that i try to explain is that when rammstein were at their biggest, they were fucking huge. they were a deal. you can go back and look at arena shows from the 2000s and they're completely sold out. people are manic for them. (i once rightly explained them as being "a boy band, but for those of us who wanted something darker and meaner.")

and those fans? they're still around. i may look strange as a diehard in toronto in 2018, but my people still exist, and that's why it was such a breath of fresh air to be with the other fanclub members this past weekend. a bunch of us still keep the fire burning. we can still recite dumb facts and exchange trivia about video shoots and discuss the meaning of song lyrics. it doesn't matter that current popular music has moved on, because we all love this fucking band, and we're together because we've loved this band through all the years and years.

and like, i don't know. how do you explain what it's like to have a band's music save you? i'm lucky enough that it's been three bands for me, throughout my life, and i have these three bands' logos all tattooed on me somewhere, because i don't know how to love something that deeply unless i get a symbol marked on me forever. and honestly, i can't tell you how joyful it was to actually have the r+ logo recognized, for once, in germany. it was the same level of joy i felt getting to be with my people for even a few days - the other diehards who owe the same level of emotional debt to this band.

my story isn't uncommon in the least. there are so many out there like me. but me, if there’s one thing i'm very, very good at, it's loving a band in complete, focused purity. so: that's what brought me to berlin, and finally got me overseas for the first time in my life. i always need a reason.

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Last call before boarding, no sleep til Berlin
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 11, 2018 at 4:12pm PDT

with the dramatic preamble out of the way, it's travel blog time!

i got out of toronto on tuesday evening, and it could have gone, uh, more smoothly - first, the travel website i'd booked my flight through had spelled my name wrong, which meant i had to wait in the long line to check in at the counter manually. second, i was randomly selected for the bag swab, which hasn't happened to me in years and was just extra shuffling to do before processing my luggage. fortunately, once that was all complete, i was able to escape to the lounge and pound like four glasses of wine. nervous flyer forever.

standard flight over, about seven and a half hours, except it was a redeye so clearly i didn't sleep a goddamn bit. getting in to tegel airport was an adventure, too - waited for ages to get off the plane, then had to be shuttled off the tarmac to the processing area, then had to wait close to an hour to be processed by the single customs officer serving the entire sold-out flight. and then finally - finally - i was in berlin.

- wednesday -

Holy shitting fuck I’m in Germany.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 12, 2018

now came the tricky part: maneuvering my way to my airbnb via bus, then subway (u-bahn). i'm pretty sure i used google maps more than any other app this past weekend. thankfully it was very straightforward, and some finicky keys and lost directions aside, i finally managed to make it to my accommodations right in the borough of prenzlauer berg (berlin is made up of 12 boroughs), which was so close to everything. and holy shit, is it ever a relief to be able to 1) put your bags down and 2) change your clothes after being awake and travelling for like 36 hours. (also, i will always love any airbnb host who leaves me chocolate. plus, she ended up being out of town from wednesday night til saturday, which meant i had the place completely to myself!)

no rest for the wicked, though, especially when the wicked are finally unleashed on berlin for the first time. quick change of clothes and i was out to wander, on a mission to get the alexa megamall on alexanderplatz in order to buy flake's book for the reading the following night, as well as to get my bearings and to find a proper currywurst. and you know what, holy shit, berlin is so beyond beautiful. it's old yet preserved, and it's sprawling but it all feels very close. i couldn't get over it, the amount of history you just feel when you're there.

here's fernsehturm berlin, the famous tv tower:

as i was shopping around, another thing i really noticed - and was so grateful for - was that if i spoke german to people, they would speak german back at me. guys, this was fucking huge for me. even though it was plainly obvious that i wasn't a native speaker, people looked pleased that i was trying, and they didn't automatically switch to english or anything. learning another language: always worth it, especially for moments like those.

also: currywurst!!

one of germany's most famous dishes (as you can see, it's a sliced up sausage and fries covered in special ketchup and mayo and sprinkled with curry powder), and i bought my first at konnopke's imbiss, which came highly recommended. and holy shit, having this as my first actual non-plane meal was heavenly. just put that german fast food in my face. (also, fries with mayo? highly recommended. i know.)

so now we're into wednesday evening, and i'm well exhausted and jetlagged as fuck, so it's back to the airbnb for me to shower (finally!), chill out, drink the bottle of cheap german wine i'd bought at lidl, and keep myself awake until 9:30-10 p.m. in order to get my body clock on german time. the next morning, my fitbit reported that i'd gotten 10 hours(!!) of sleep. great success.

- thursday -

i had big plans for thursday, since i knew i'd have gotten some sleep and a shower and would be ready to go. i was up at 9 a.m. and out the door before 10, hopping the u-bahn across town to the kurfürstendamm (ku'damm) district in order to get this photo:

at the end of rammstein's video for "mein teil" from 2005, they come out of this very exit (all looking like actual fucking nightmares), and you're damn right i wanted a picture of it now that i was here. even more synchronicity for me: it was only a short walk away from a cat cafe(!!), zur mieze, so of course i had to stop by and ended up staying for an adorable breakfast:

(this was kenzo, my breakfast companion) i tell you, as a cat lover, there's nothing more adorable than having a little meal in a cute tea room surrounded by cats. just the best.

then it was off to walk back through ku'damm on my way to the tiergarten, snapping pictures of architecture and old churches the entire way. once i made it to the zoological garden, even though i had just eaten, i still valiantly tried to plow my way through yet another currywurst, this time from the legendary curry 36:

i accidentally ordered a double portion and nearly died, the end.

my solo walk around basically the lower perimeter of the tiergarten took me forever, but it brought some lovely sights like this one (berlin in the fall, oh my heart):

plus, it got me back around to downtown, where i joined the rest of the tourists in getting a photo of the famous brandenburger tor:

from there it was over to rausch schokoladenhaus near gendarmenmarkt square in mitte, to pick up some treats for my coworkers as well as snap photos of their famous chocolate berlin landmarks, including the reichstag building:

i continued through gendarmenmarkt to get some better shots of famous landmarks, such as part of the square itself:

konzerthaus berlin:

and then over the bridge to museum island:

here's a better shot of the majestic building to the left there, the berliner dom, or the berlin cathedral:

like i said before, there's so much old beauty throughout berlin that it just kills you. hence my tweet:

Also, everyone: “You can’t walk Berlin, just take the subway and get out in places” Me: *walks all over Berlin*
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 13, 2018

joke was on me, though - i only brought one pair of shoes (my tall timberland boots), and they ended up giving my feet multiple blisters the size of toonies. walking was painful, and i'd only been in the city for two days. well, fuck. (plus the zipper started to blow out on my right boot by saturday, causing me much panic) the perils of a hardcore walker, i guess. slap bandaids on any of the broken ones and get back out there.

speaking of that - one shower and outfit change later, and i was off to see flake (aka christian lorenz, the keyboardist of rammstein) do a book reading at a music venue in the friedrichshain borough. i got lost on the s-bahn (the above-ground transit train system) like three goddamn times, but i finally made it there, and ended up running into kirsi, a member of the rammstein fanclub who noticed my shirt and introduced herself. yes! friends!!

but also, like, this:

The Flake book reading is full of VERY NORMAL looking people and I showed up dressed like this pic.twitter.com/JITtHwZMjJ
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 13, 2018

i'm not even joking, i scanned the room and maybe only saw like 5-6 rammstein shirts. i felt hilariously out of place. obviously, even more so during the reading, which was two hours of flake telling us impromptu stories as well as reading from his second/most recent book, heute hat die welt geburtstag ("today is the world's birthday") - but clearly entirely in german. still, i kept up as best i could, and it was just so rad to see the man himself, especially out of costume and being so casual and cool:

it was getting late and exhaustion was setting in, but kirsi and i were determined to hang around and see if flake would be autographing books. and bless him, he did - and he signed everything that everyone asked him for. even when it's clearly a non-german dumbass who has to spell her name very carefully in german phonetics and then babbles "entschuldige für mein schlectes deutsch" ("sorry for my bad german"):

but he was so patient and humble and like a german machine with the autographing. last true punk flake forever.

kirsi and i schoolgirl-giggled our entire way back to the s-bahn, and i finally crashed back into bed at the airbnb close to midnight. a very successful second day in berlin!

- friday -

no stopping, no stopping - friday was all about getting outta the downtown touristville and going to see some of the cooler, more authentic parts of berlin. (prenzlauer berg, the borough i was staying in, was mostly affluent hipsters and young families) first up was catching the s-/u-bahn to neukölln in the west part of town:

and man, i think i fell even more in love with this borough than i did anywhere else. it just felt very real, barely gentrified in places, and a real down-to-earth vibe. i loved the hell out of neukölln, even though i couldn't get a döner kebab because the place i went to didn't have the meat ready yet(?). so i settled for hanging around the neukölln arcaden and eating a laugenbretzel instead, which ended up being stuffed with nutella:

i ate so many laugenbretzels on this trip, and drank at least two milchkaffee a day before realizing that they're just a latte and not some fancy german-only hot coffee drink. (this realization was akin to wondering what the tram was and then seeing "oh, it's just a streetcar") you're in germany, carb the hell up.

from there i hopped back on the s-/u-bahn to get to the borough of kreuzberg, which is known for having some really amazing street art, and since i'm a street art geek this was definitely a must-visit area for me:

from there it wasn't too far to walk to checkpoint charlie which, although it's touristy as hell, i figured i ought to check out anyway. history and all that. however, that made me just want to go find some remains of the berlin wall - might as well go all in on the tourist business, right? - so out came google maps and me trying to figure out how to take the subway out to the wall memorial park in mitte. at least i got to spot some more cool wall art on the way:

(the years on the knife are the years between the rise and fall of the berlin wall, btw) i made it out to the memorial park and was able to get some good pictures that even choked me up a little bit:

time was wearing on at this point, and i had plans in the evening, so i made my way back to prenzlauer berg to once again shower and change at my airbnb. it was time to go meet the rest of the rammstein fanclub.

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guess who’s going to the black metal bar
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 14, 2018 at 8:45am PDT

those of us who were attending this international meetup (the native german fans meet up every couple of months) were set to gather at prater garten, the oldest beer garden in berlin. and yes, guy, it was definitely an international bunch: three netherlanders, a good handful of germans, four swedes, an american ex-pat living in berlin, an italian, a finn, a norwegian, and me, the canadian who traveled all this way. (anna, one of the organizers, laughingly said she'd felt pressure to make it a fun meetup weekend for me so that the trip was worthwhile)

and then i got some sudden, very unexpected bad news. i'm going to save that for the next blog post, though. oooooh, a cliffhanger!

anyway, we hung out and drank and had fun for a few hours at the beer garden, then we all decamped together to blackland, a bar (a very bovine sex club-esque bar at that) just a short tram ride away. why? this is why:

turns out there's a thriving industry for rammstein cover bands in europe, and rammczech is apparently one of the better-known ones. and you know what, they definitely deserve to be. check this shit out:

(that's fanclub meetup organizer anna in the last one, singing the backup vocals on "engel") honestly, if you guessed that i lost my mind like a hundred times, you're right. they had fully accurate stage costumes and costume changes! a fog machine! well-practiced choreography! they played the entire 2018 tour set list! (though they subbed in "rosenrot" for "pussy", which was fine by me because i've always wanted to see that song performed live anyway)

In case you ever doubted me pic.twitter.com/ic2W7mQjDH
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 14, 2018

i had the time of my goddamn life, i swear. you know those nights where you're with the same people the next day and they say stuff like "ha ha you reallyyyyyy had fun last night, yeah?" and you realize it's because you were so fucking into it that the entire room noticed? ooof, red-faced. but at least i could pack my shame away since i was on vacation - i mean, clearly i was there singing at the top of my lungs, headbanging, throwing the horns, and dancing my heart out. hanni and kirsi and i kept throwing our arms around each other and singing along in a group, hugging and laughing. it was just the best. maybe because i haven't been to as many rammstein shows as the rest, but i enjoyed the hell out of the night and ughhhhh it was so, so great to hear those songs played live again, even by a tribute band. too much fun.

i am who i've always been, and who i've always supposed to be:

even though the haze of beer and jagermeister, i managed to find my way back to the airbnb by like 1 a.m., took off my smeared eyeliner and fading lipstick, and fell asleep pretty much immediately. hell yeah, friday.

- saturday -

Me, this morning: “wait, what’s this paper in my bag-“ Apparently I drunkenly grabbed the set list. Dork.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 15, 2018

guess whose wakeup alarm went off at 6:45 a.m. the next morning? mine. fucking christ. the reason: the official storefront location of the rammsteinshop was opening at 9 a.m. as a special occasion for the fanclub members, and since it was sort of in a northern part of town, i needed to maneuver my way up there on the train. (i had early birthday money to spend and i was hellbent and determined to get an early pick at things) so, hungover and on three hours of sleep, i only got lost twice as i made my way to wilheimsruh, fortunately running into anna, hanna, and nikki from the fanclub on their way as well.

and guys. you guys. the store was the best goddamn thing. first off, they had concert props and posters on display on the upper level:

then on the lower level: so much merch.

it was already packed when we got there at 9:30, so they were only letting people in six at a time, but i got everything that'd been on my list: the double-zip moto hoodie, the xxi klavier t-shirt, the mock ramones logo t-shirt, the knit scarf, two posters (one for their first show back in america in 2010 and one for the paris concert film), a fanclub patch, and a new pin for my jacket. i also picked up two bonuses from the samples/damaged rack: a thin grey sweatshirt with the amour lyrics/skull design that they never put into production, and a copy of the super limited-edition völkerball tour photo book/4-cd & dvd set marked down to 50€ because the back cover was damaged in a spot. (i also got a fanclub pack from the meetup the previous night, which included a lifad flag, a sticker, and special lapel pin - they were all out of the canada print so i was fine taking usa instead, why not) sure, i had to basically clean & jerk my suitcase into the plane's overhead bin on sunday because it was so heavy, but hey, whatever it takes. once in a lifetime.

the lineups were intense and it took a while to checkout, but as soon as i finished (it took them two bags to pack up all my stuff, haha) i was headed back downtown to get a bit of downtime before the day's next activity: a guided group tour of schloss schönhausen in the pankow borough.

but first: döner kebab break!

it was the hardest goddamn thing to eat, but so satisfying, especially when you've barely eaten anything in over 24 hours. (i tried my damndest to avoid the three construction bros who were clearly having fun watching this goth in a black dress and red rose headband try to tackle a massive, drippy sandwich.)

so it was back on the s-bahn to get to pankow, and another short walk to reach schloss schönhausen, which isn't really a castle at all but more of a baroque manor. the importance to us, though, is that the interior was used for the band's "du riechst so gut" video in 1998. here's the outside of the building, plus the ballroom and staircase where two of the pivotal scenes were filmed:

also, the view from the grounds was lovely. perfect early fall weather in berlin.

the guided tour was good fun, even if my feet were just screaming at me at this point. once it was over, i did one more loop back to the airbnb - this time to start packing up my stuff, since i was leaving early the next day - before rejoining the group at cafe chagall around the corner, because it was our rammstein trivia night! (i didn't win - the questions were suuuuuuper hard - but it was hilarious fun anyway, even if i was trying to keep from falling asleep on the table)

here's anna giving a lovely little speech about how happy she is to see us all together. lifad ist für alle da.

- sunday -

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Tschüss Deutschland 😢 🇩🇪 #TXL 🛫.....🛬 #YYZ 🇨🇦
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 15, 2018 at 11:36pm PDT

okay, so, did i have a little cry on sunday about having to leave? i sure as hell did. it wasn't even that i was still super underslept - i had to get up at 6:30 a.m. and be on the u-bahn by 7:30 in order to catch the transfer bus to the airport - but it just felt like i ought to have been staying. i have friends and family in toronto, sure, but not much else now, so why did i have to leave? sigh. so depressing. (i did, however, accidentally take the bus that went the long way around to the airport rather than the express bus, but that was actually a really nice way to leave the city)

still, i gamely went through the paces at the airport, though this time instead of the random bag swab i had to get full-body wanded presumably because my nipple piercings were setting off the metal detector. sigh.

Filed under “dubious traveling accomplishments”: getting selected for the random bag swab in Pearson, and getting wanded at Tegel. The metal punk travel aesthetic does me no favours.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 16, 2018

but the flight went off without a hitch, despite my usual anxiety around takeoff/turbulence/landing, and the fact that it was a nine-hour flight, which is a long as hell time to be in one place. boooooooring.

touched down at pearson airport yesterday afternoon, bodily dragged all my bags full of band merch through the airport, had one of the express shuttle staff ask me if i was coming from a conference since i was carrying two rolled-up posters ("no, i was at a band fanclub meetup in germany"), cursed the fact that it was still hot summer in toronto and i was wearing a sweatshirt & leggings (and carrying a jacket), and now here i am again. despite the lingering post-vacation sadness, it's good to be home. honestly, there were a few times when i felt like my body was totally gonna fail me on this trip; i was constantly tired, sore from carrying my bags, and my feet were blistering up like crazy. but i remember thinking to myself: bruises fade. blisters disappear. but these memories you make, those are for a lifetime. so fuck the pain and forget about the marks - go make some memories instead. those will last.

okay, that's the whole of it. like i said, i'll be back tomorrow to briefly cover the bad news i got while on vacation (no one died and no one has cancer, i promise), so tune in then i guess? love love love.

[ music | none ]

american jet set

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 23:12:00 +0000

so here we are: tomorrow! finally!! i'm off to germany!!!

I love how my biggest packing dilemma right now is “black tights or thigh socks?” (the latter usually wins but they’re bulkier to pack)
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 8, 2018

am i ready? i mean, i think so. i better be. i don't travel much, so i definitely have the tendency to over-plan and over-stress and over-analyze every single detail. but i feel good about this - i've got everything in order, i've had plenty of time to pack and organize, and i keep reminding myself that i'm only gone for five days anyway. (though i'm very certain by the time i'm back at the airport to head home, i'll want to stay for another week)

i said there that i don't travel much, which is my only explanation for why this is my first time(!) travelling overseas. honestly, i've never been off the continent. i definitely could have gone by now - i mean, i'm in my thirties - but for one, i just never felt like i had a good enough excuse to go (it's expensive! i'm poor!), and for two, travelling has just...never been a priority for me. if it had been, i would have been putting money towards it a long time ago.

i have friends and colleagues and family members for whom travel is the priority; they go multiple places every year. but me, i like being home. i like my apartment and i like my stuff. it sounds so lame, but that's how it is. so for me, travel isn't top of mind when it comes to life priorities or what i want to spend my money on.

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On loan! I will be READY.
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Aug 27, 2018 at 6:25am PDT

does that mean it's more special when i actually do it? sure, though it still wracks me with anxiety and worry about everything that could go wrong. plus i almost always travel solo, which means i don't have anyone to play off of or keep me company during the longer stretches. but in the end, i prefer it that way - i can do what i want, when i want. i just have to find a way to reassure my own worries, is all. (but i'm self-sufficient as hell and i don't give up easily, both of which being useful traits when it comes to problem-solving)

still, this is all superseded by the fact that i love an adventure, and i'm willing to do whatever it takes in order to shake my life up a little. speaking of changing things, a quick interlude story - my mother can be a funny one; she claims sometimes to have a bit of the shining, and her mother before her (and sure, i have some intuition and have seen some weird things, but all stories for another time), which is interesting because my mom is the most practical person. anyway, here's a conversation we had last week:

me: "i mean, i really hope i love berlin."
mom: "hmmmm...."
me: "wait, why 'hmmmm'? do you think i'm not going to love it?"
mom: "no, no, it's just...i have a feeling that you're going to fall in love there."
me: "what, in love with a person?"
mom: "hmmmm, maybe. i just have a feeling."

like i said, it's always slightly weird when she pulls this stuff out on me, because she's a practical skeptic to the core, and so i do tend to give it a bit of weight because of how rare her i just have a feelings are. of course, i replied to her with "well, it better be the member of rammstein that i have a crush on" and she laughed at me and that was it. so it's not like i'm immediately hopping on tinder once the flight wheels are down, but it's kind of a fun thing to keep an eye out for. you gotta believe in something.

(cue the "i believe i'll have another drink, ha ha ha!" joke.)

anyway, back to the actual travel process tomorrow - as i mentioned before, by the grace of my lovely best friend emma, i've got premium lounge access as an early birthday present. that means before my outbound flight, i get to sit in the fancy exclusive area, eat free snacks, and drink as much complimentary booze as i need to get me onto the goddamn plane. (in case you're just joining us, i'm typically quite a bad flier, but if i've got enough alcohol in my system then i'm pretty calm. there might actually be the chance that i even sleep a bit!)

the nagging problem for me is that although it's thankfully a direct flight, i likely won't be sleeping for way over 24 hours. sure, i'll be buzzing on caffeine and adrenaline once i get into berlin, but there's still the chance that my old-ass body is just gonna give the fuck up and be too exhausted for me to enjoy anything on my first day there. my friend jenna gave me the advice that "you're going to want to go to bed at like 6 p.m. but don't, it's a trap, you'll wake up at 4 a.m. and not get back to normal" and i'm gonna do my best to take it. hopefully there should be plenty for me to do in berlin on wednesday night to keep me going for a while!

lastly, quick housekeeping before i go: i'll be tweeting when i can over the next five days, and i'll definitely be putting photos up on my instagram, but i'm going to be six hours ahead of my usual time zone (eastern standard) so keep an eye out for that (i.e. friends, please don't message me at like 8 p.m. eastern time, that's 2 a.m. in berlin). i'll be back in toronto late sunday afternoon and will definitely be doing up a travel-adventures blog post for monday.

my motto for this trip: mach alles, bereue nichts (do everything, regret nothing)

wish me all the luck in safe travel, not getting robbed, making new friends, drinking so much beer, and buying all the merch i could want at the band store. everything is happening.

[ music | rammstein, "mein land (mogwai remix)" ]

don't slow down

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 14:23:00 +0000

thank god for september, even if we're still a month away from the actual best month:

true faith pic.twitter.com/wBXD5e5tdD
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 3, 2018

i'm also incredibly thankful that after an entire month(!), my new jacket for my trip finally made its way to me:

(this is the outfit i'm gonna wear to the opening of the rammsteinstore next saturday. yes, the crown of red roses is a deep reference.)

it was actually a bit of a trial tracking this sucker down - even though i ordered it on august 7th and it was posted for pickup by the carrier on august 16th(!), it didn't get moved until august 27th(!!) and by then i was panicking a bit. it was looking like it would arrive earlier this week, even with labour day being a holiday, but then tracking reported it had gone back to miami(?!?) via montreal, which was clearly some kind of weird error.

anyway, the moral of the story is to always be dubious about package tracking, but i wanted to trust it when it said that my package was on an international flight overnight to toronto. fortunately, it was correct this time, and the package arrived yesterday with my new jacket inside! it's a little boxy around the chest - because i sized up (i always size up my jackets so i can fit a hoodie under them), unfortunately the chest area is also sized up, and i do not have that kind of chest - but i'm determined to make it work so i can wear it on my trip next week.

here it is done up, even though i think it looks better left open:

(the surprising part of this selfie was finding out how many people didn't know i have my abdomen tattooed.) anyway, moral of the story is that even though the shipping process was slow and insane, shop pretty attitude for all your rock n' roll and goth-punk needs. i have a discount code if you need one.

so here we go, the last weekend in toronto before my big trip! you bet your ass it came up more quickly than i thought it would, and now i'm spending most of this weekend doing last-minute prep (i still have all day next monday, though, and tuesday morning pre-airport), getting all my shit together, crossing stuff off my to-do and to-pack lists, and fitting in hangs with friends before i go. (this means vodka and watching wrestling, obviously.) is it overly cautious/paranoid to get your passport/birth certificate/health card photocopied so you have extra copies on hand when you travel? whatever, i did it.

i'm lucky enough that bff emma is from england, so she has both plug converters and a european hair straightener to lend me, which is going to make things at my airbnb significantly easier. (even if the process of getting my airbnb's key isn't quite - turns out the host is working on wednesday when i get in, so i have to go pick up the key from uhhhh the bakery next door? germany!) so trading off flatirons is a grand excuse for some balcony drinking this lovely weekend.

also, uncomfortably, this needed to be taken care of before much else:

Nothing like spending my lunch break whipping my boob out in front of a stranger. (This is funnier out of context, but I just had to get one of my piercings checked.)
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) September 5, 2018

oh, hey! did you know that sometimes it takes years for a piercing to heal? because i'm a dumbass who certainly didn't (i'm also a dumbass who's had three other piercings, so you think i'd have learned this by now).

i'll skip any of the grossness, but all the way back to the initial piercing aftercare, my left side took much longer to sort itself out than the right. it was still painful and icky for a solid two weeks after the right had healed up. anyway, smash cut to now - a year and a half later! - and on and off for the last couple months, my left nipple's piercing has been bugging me. it's clearly not infected and there's nothing wrong with it visually (that is, my body isn't rejecting it or anything), but it's been painful and sore deep in a nagging way. why? whyyyyy?

finally, after days of anxiety trying to figure out what it could be - do i need a longer post on the stud? did i develop a sudden metal allergy? is it just pms? - i gave in and went back to the shop where i had it pierced to get it checked, hence the tweet above. the piercer checked it, took the stud out, examined the piercing hole, and proclaimed that "it's not quite healed." me: "even though it's been a year and a half, and the right side is completely fine?" turns out: yes. what.

so now here i am, back on the saltwater-soak-and-antibacterial-cleanser regimen (trisan is a godsend by the way), trying to get this pain to go away (or at the very least, lessen) before i leave next week. don't get me wrong, i'm not expecting an emergency - like i said, it's not like my body's rejecting it or it's gotten infected or anything - but i really don't want to have to take the stud out. this shit closes up real quick, and i'd rather not have to pay to get it re-pierced - and going lopsided with just one piercing is not an option for me. i like symmetry in my body mods, thanks.

yeah anyway that is all very uncomfortable and gross, but what can you expect when you've got a piece of metal shoved through your flesh, really. and to think i'm here considering buying pasties instead of showing off all this effort. tch.

okay, that's all the update i have for now - i'll be back with a little more of whatever before i leave on tuesday! have a most excellent weekend and please know that i am doing the same.

p.s. listen to this goddamn remix, i've legit had it on repeat for days:

please don't ask about the cover art, i do not know, but know that i love them so much.

[ music | none ]

quick change artist

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 13:29:00 +0000

brief bit of housekeeping before we start: first, yes, comments left on blog posts here are moderated (by me), which means i have to approve them before they show up (and blogger wasn't sending me notifications for like, months), so don't panic if your comment doesn't appear right away! the spambots and weird creeps are out there, and i am my own first line of defense.

secondly, the crowdfunding suggestion made me laugh, anon, because me asking internet people for money is...strange to me? but you did give me the idea to sign up for a ko-fi profile, so thank you. it's more of a low-scale, low-donation site that lets people (anonymously or not) toss a few bucks via paypal at a content creator every now and then. whether or not i get anything out of it remains to be seen, but hey, it's just blogging. i don't do this to get paid or anything. (also my excuse as to why i don't have ads here, because who would even click on them?)

still, widget's there on the right sidebar, so have at it if you feel like it, or if you've ever been entertained by stories from my weird little life. i promise not to be like heinrich but asking for money instead of compliments:

i also promise i won't use it to buy myself more goth lipsticks like this (unless you, the reader, want me to):

it's black with silver sparkles and i got it for $8. of course i love it to pieces.

in the meantime, in more places i'm wasting my money - the biannual sephora 20% sale is almost over, and i got out relatively unscathed? i mostly just restocked on stuff i needed - extra eyeliner, a blush compact (still costly but one of those lasts me like two years), a favourite lip gloss that i was almost out of - as well as a travel set of face cleanser + eye mask for my trip, and a small dual pack of face masks because they were on sale and why not, good value. plus sometimes you just gotta decongest your face, you know? especially if your complexion is as gross as mine is on the reg.

a true caitlin fact: one of the most extra things about me is that i do a different face mask every night.

when you’re doing a face mask that makes you the exact same colour as a Ninja Turtle pic.twitter.com/NflnTCybd1
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) July 5, 2018

i mean it when i say i legit have 6-7 masks and i basically just rotate them all week long, every week. look, i have so few pieces of dumb self-care, just let me have this one.

so the "lay low and be broke" holiday long weekend is going well over here; it's always a little strange how solidly the city empties out on a holiday weekend, especially for this last gasp at cottaging, but i'm just, y'know, here. doing laundry and cleaning my apartment (my bathroom is grosstown) and watching a bunch of movies on tv. these do-nothing weekends are also relaxing for me because it means i don't have to shower or put on makeup or wear a bra (or pants), and the freedom to be an utter slob is liberating.

does this make me antisocial? probably! but it's how i relax, for real.

like i was saying, though, it's astounding how many people disappear from toronto on a long weekend. i mean, i can understand it - the big-city grind can be a lot, especially in the summertime - but i find it hard not to roll my eyes a bit at cottage culture. that speaks to where i come from, though; i have a solidly middle-class upbringing, and i didn't grow up in a family with a cottage, so i honestly don't feel like i'm missing out on anything. sure, i've been to friends' cottages once in a while, but it's not something that's a summertime weekend-escape necessity for me. i know a lot of people here my age who are all cottages are liiiiiiife but like...sure? i'm a city girl. i like being here, especially when nobody else is.

talk of cottages makes me think of islands, though, and my mother asking if i'm coming back at all any time this year. thanksgiving is a no, even though i could still do it and make it back for my birthday (it's on a wednesday this year), but i want to spend my first ever(!) thanksgiving in toronto. every single year, ever since i moved out when i was 18, i go back to kingston for thanksgiving weekend. but i dunno, i feel like it's time to do something different? i gotta make my own life at some point, and that also includes making my own christmas plans as well. there's still time for things to change, but we'll see. i'm old enough now.

speaking of being old - my mother and stepfather retired last week. just over 40 years at the same workplace for my mom (and a little over 30 years for my stepdad - they worked at the same place, though not in the same department), which is both intense and bananas when you think about it. sure, we might not have had a cottage, but my mom holding down that job (and steadily moving up) made my comfortable existence possible, so she definitely deserves to have all the free time in the world. (my mother was/is an artist in multiple mediums, so it's going to be nice for her get back to that and see what she creates)

not much left to say on this muggy sunday, so here's my friend's adorable dog.

Dog days of summer
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Sep 1, 2018 at 4:31pm PDT

happy labour day weekend!

[ music | florence + the machine, "only if for a night" ]

just leave it here

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 23:16:00 +0000

wow here's me very awake and alert:

(i'm always thankful that, even in photos where i look my age, i don't look as rundown or haggard as i think i will.) (my lipstick is my current favourite by the way - mac's dare you, which i got as a freebie on national lipstick day, hell yes to useful free things)

little bit of catch-up: hell yessssssssss wrestling good times.

Shots from @smashwrestling Super Showdown VI, second half
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Aug 26, 2018 at 4:59pm PDT

(there's more photos on my insta, as always) this past sunday was smash wrestling's biggest show of the year, super showdown, and whew it definitely didn't disappoint. a packed house, a hot card, air conditioning and cold beer all add up to success, and it's always a good way to spend a sunday, even if i'm sadly going to miss the next show since i'll just be getting back from berlin :( but then this weekend is all in, and even though i did sell my ticket months ago (i hope the person who bought it has fun!), i'm still gonna tune in afterwards to catch the replay on new japan world. a decent way to spend this upcoming holiday weekend, especially if it continues to be a goddamn heat wave outside here in toronto.

it's perhaps notable that i removed most mentions of loving wrestling from my online dating profile, but kept the skeletor meme picture.

i'm going to be a good catch for somebody.

more recapping: the german meetup last week was great fun and good practice! i did feel a little out of place - i was quite a bit younger than a lot of the participants, plus i was new, plus my speaking skills were not as up to par as everyone else's - but i left feeling proud of the fact that i was able to understand about 98% of what everyone was saying. so sure, i wasn't able to contribute much, but my comprehension skills are far and away so much better than they've been, and i was just tickled by it. (i'm buying flake's second book when i get to berlin, so there's at least a chance i might be able to understand some of it. like, maybe.)

GUYS I thought I was gonna be terrible and I was just okaaayyyy BUT the woman next to me was blown away and said I should be proud of myself for how well I did. I’m getting a little teary-eyed :’) pic.twitter.com/662gheRpkV
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) August 22, 2018

like i said before, though, now's the time for me to keep my nose to the grindstone and just lay low, save my money, save my energy. berlin will be here before i know it (i'll be there two weeks from today!!), and i want to save up all my good times for when they'll be extra worth it.

...unfortunately, i know me, and this kind of deprivation combined with boredom breeds a lot of dumb decisions that go against everything i say i'm gonna do. case in point: it's a very not-great time of year for the annual sephora 20% off everything sale; despite me saying i have to save my money, i already restocked on my expensive nars blush (my mental justification: one compact lasts me like two years! it's worth it!) and bought a travel pack of stuff i need for my trip. on that same note, despite me swearing up and down i'm gonna lay low, i've still been putting out feelers to see who's in town the next couple weekends and who wants to hang out. i am my own saboteur, always.

like, did i need this new eyeshadow palette (my seventh, for those keeping track at home)? no, no i did not.

but then there were all these pieces about how urban decay was discontinuing its uber-popular naked palette forever, and i didn't already own one (i have both naked smoky and naked heat though), and i somehow managed to justify it to myself despite the fact that the naked palettes are really built for those who know how to blend (i do not know how to blend), and by the time i found one at the nearby shoppers i was sold. i mean, it was $33, come on.

so if i can get past this dumb spending hump, i think i'll be golden. this is going to be good for me, getting away for a bit and doing something by myself, for myself and nobody else. it's a little adventure, and i get to do it solo, without anybody's approval for where i'm going or what i'm getting up to. it could be a good reset, and god knows i need to reset some shit in my life. there's just so much i really don't need.

that's all for now!

[ music | afi, "girl's not grey" ]

make this life liveable

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 22:34:00 +0000

because summertime is prime time to buy jackets i won't be able to wear for another like three months - i finally bought this beauty:

the fervent hope is that it'll be cool enough in berlin by mid-september that i can wear it there; i don't particularly want to be walking around in studded pleather in high heat, but holy shit, what a great look this would be if i can do it. extremely on-brand for me.

but in the just-in-time department: last week, i got an email invite to a duolingo event - a german conversations meetup tomorrow! apparently this is a monthly gathering that's been happening for years, only now duolingo's integrated it as one of its community events. i have no idea what it'll be like or what the demographic is, but it should be interesting nonetheless - and i really, really do need to work on having more confidence in my conversation skills. i'm afraid i'm gonna be so mute once i'm overseas. (fortunately, it was just reaffirmed that the fanclub meetup will primarily be in english, so i don't have to worry so much about being the odd girl out)

so! it's still been busy times over here, especially this past weekend:

In which Emma attempts to take her cat for a walk.
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Aug 18, 2018 at 11:35am PDT

My colleagues out running the big road race in Falmouth today and I’m gonna do my second consecutive night of eating chips for dinner.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) August 19, 2018

between a big bbq party at emma's on saturday and watching a wrestling ppv with the usual gang on sunday, i'm completely beat. add the fact that my apartment was suddenly without water on sunday and i was extra exhausted - had to haul laundry to the laundromat instead, had to shower at the gym after my workout so i needed to cart all my supplies there and back, had to go to the mall to use the washroom, et cetera. i mean, absolute first world problems (and i just had to shrug and deal with it), but still annoying on a day when i was already running around like crazy on very little sleep. i need to chill out.

so after the last manic couple of days, i'm really trying to stay on the down low; i need to just be a homebody hermit for a while, save my money and liver cells, and prepare for the next few weeks to go by swiftly and hopefully stress-free. my trip's gonna be here before i know it, and i want to at least be somewhat well-rested and ready to go.

all the same, i've been back doing a couple episodes of the big gold belt podcast here and there, and i just guested on top marks again last week. i just feel like it's a good idea to get my voice out there (both figuratively and literally), you know? even if i'm not entirely sure i've managed to break my habit of speaking too quickly, ugh. but still, cheap thrills that can be done from home.

oh, and one thing i forget to mention: last month i bought a fitbit!

yr girl out here crushing it at the sleep game pic.twitter.com/B9IsbnqJXw
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) August 13, 2018

but the reason behind this purchase is a story, my friends.

on a simple level, when i switched my ipods, i also lost out on the step counter that came built in to my newer model, and i'm kind of obsessive about tracking my daily steps. so, it was good timing to get one - a flex 2 - even though i'd always thought they were a bit dorky, oh well.

but the real reason is because i was beginning to be afraid that i sleepwalk.

it started with my makeup shelf falling off the wall in my bathroom in the middle of the night last month. i recently read a tumblr post that said something like "you don't know terror until a poster falls off your wall while you're asleep" and holy shit, is that ever the truth. i mean, i'm already really bad with sudden loud noises as it is, and something crashing down in my apartment while i'm dead asleep? fuck outta here with that.

so yeah, annoying and terrifying, but i reorganized my shelf and bought some new hooks and got it back up on the wall. four days later, it crashed down again, further fraying my nerves and my patience. i put it back up one more time, but i wasn't entirely sure it was stable, and that started to nag at me - i was legit lying in bed in fear that i'd be woken up by another massive crashing noise. it's not fun!

cut to the next evening - it was a saturday night, i came in drunk as hell from a wrestling show, and i distinctly remember thinking before going to bed: "should i shut my bedroom door so that if my bathroom shelf falls down again, the noise might not be so bad?" i immediately dismissed it, though, because i couldn't keep living in fear of some dumb sound that may or may not happen again.

so, i didn't close my door, went to bed, slept soundly, woke up in the morning, bedroom door was now closed.

the fuck.

barring a ghost, the only way the door could have been closed is if my drunk paranoid brain woke me up, walked me across the room while i was sleeping (because i absolutely do not recall doing this at all), shut the door, and got me back to bed.

...look, if you know me, you know this is exactly the kind of dumb thing that dumb hypochondriac me gets freaked out about. any amateur psychologist could tell you that i have a need to always be in control of myself and situations, and i've always, always been weirded out by sleep phenomenon - especially sleepwalking. it's not like i'd ever done it - none of my sleeping partners or roommates have ever told me i'd done anything weird - but just the idea that it could happen whenever was enough to scare me, especially since i live on the 18th floor of a high-rise and one of my "this would never happen but i'm scared of it anyway" scenarios is that i sleepwalk off the balcony.

and look! here we are, potentially sleepwalking! fuck me.

so anyway, thoroughly creeped out by my own damn self, i marched myself to the mall the very next day and bought the fitbit, reasoning that it would record that i was upright and "awake" if i did anything weird like that again. (it didn't help my anxiety that emma legitimately sleepwalks often, and she was counselling me to "install a chain lock" on my door so i don't wander out of my apartment, etc.) unfortunately, what i've found is that it does track "steps" during the night - but it's typically arm flails and similar motions. so, i frequently wake up in the morning to find that i've "walked" 20-40 steps while it otherwise says i'm asleep. but i mean, i kind of do trust that that's just arm motions - there's no alerts that i'm awake, and i'm pretty sure the analytics would say so.

like i said, it's been a month now since i've had this fitbit strapped to my wrist, and my panic period over being a possible sleepwalker has passed. i'm no longer worried about it; i think the mystery door-closing was a one-off occasion fueled by booze and loud-noise anxiety. i'm typically a very good sleeper, as the above chart demonstrates, and i'd like to think that i'd wake up if i moved out of the bed during sleep. the mysteries of the human brain and subconscious.

here's a relevant song to close out, and also, a banger:

[ music | rammstein, "nebel" ]

even if you're gone

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 19:22:00 +0000

whew! yes. thanks to those of you who read the previous blog post and are excited for me - i'm crazy excited for me, too. this whole going-to-berlin thing has been a dream for like a year and a half now, and now i've got the tickets to go. holy shit.

my parents were obviously not as thrilled; my father sounded apprehensive ("i'm going to worry about you the entire time you're there") while my mother just sounded bemused ("i thought your plan was to go next year?" i mean, i'm doing that too, i just didn't want next year to be my first time - i want the lay of the land first). but i mean, this is my life, and i'm a grown-ass adult who's seen so little of the world. i'm way overdue in getting out there and having some once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

though like i said, everything is coming together nicely (i'm way excited about my airbnb and how centrally located it is), i'm plotting out what parts of the city i'm gonna visit on which days, i've upped my daily german language lessons exponentially, and my bestie even offered to pay for my air canada lounge access on my outboard trip - which means unlimited free booze, snacks, and wifi, hell yes. there's the small chance i'll actually sleep on the plane if i'm tipsy enough, so i might try for it. (within reason, i know.)

but enough of that for now - what else has been going on in my life this summer? let's do a somewhat lengthy recap (there'll be a lot of multimedia embeds to break this up; even if i'm not blogging a lot i'm still and always very active on twitter and instagram):

i've watched a ton of wrestling!

#Slammiversary @impactwrestling
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jul 22, 2018 at 6:22pm PDT

i mean, what else is new? i'm never lying when i joke about how i only care about german metal and pro wrestling and nothing else.

aside from new japan's g1 tournament wrapping up after a month of wrecking my sleep schedule, i've had plenty of occasions to hang out with pals and watch wrestling, either on tv or in person. last month, i was lucky enough to get to go to both impact slammiversary and the following night of tv tapings, which was an unexpected blast. so many people and such great vibes, even if the venue (rebel) was in the middle of nowhere on the lower east side.

next up: nxt takeover/wwe summerslam ppv watching this saturday and sunday, followed by the next smash wrestling event on sunday the 26th. (yes, even with my clamped-down budget for my germany trip, i'm still making enough allowances to get me to my favourite wrestling promotion in the city)

i was barred from a concert!

okay look, i'm trying not to be too bitter about this because it was my dumb decision, but i really could have used the $80 i spent on that ticket that ended up being worthless, so: i had a ticket to go see afi and rise against a few weeks back, and i was super looking forward to it. i'd bought the ticket back in like, april, and my original plan was to go with bff jenna, who also loves both those bands. (i'd already seen afi at rockfest last year and adored them)

however, jenna had an emergency come up and had to cancel, so i figured i'd go it alone. unfortunately, i also figured i'd wear my spiked crown for the very punk occasion:

menace to society pic.twitter.com/FcKLjtITJm
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) July 28, 2018

i'd worn it to rockfest and to a few wrestling shows, so it should be fine as an accessory, right? wrong, my friends. even though the spikes are blunt and clearly i'm not gonna be out in the pit headbutting anybody, security at the venue took one look at my head and told me i couldn't come in with it. "okay, what if i just wear it around my neck?" "no, it can't come in." *security points at garbage bin* and i mean, no fucking way was i going to trash my $65 spiked crown of awesomeness.

so i turned right around and went home. at least i bought myself ice cream to help myself feel a little better about missing out because of my idiot fashion pride.

i went to kingston / my stepbrother got married!

quick two-parter here: so it turns out that my stepbrother got engaged, like, a month ago, and they were going to get married in a casual island wedding on the august long weekend. it was a bit manic schedule-wise for me, since i would just be coming off of half a week of housesitting/catsitting for emma (who was in the uk for two weddings herself), but i couldn't not attend, so i forked over the money for a round-trip train ride back to kingston - my first time visiting since christmas.

and hey, it actually was...fine? it was a civic holiday long weekend here in canada, so pretty much everybody was out cottaging and drinking a shit ton and instagramming photos of their vacations out of town, and i was happy to join the masses for once. it was good to get face time with my family after so long, and i guess a break out of the big city is good for the soul. i guess. (i still don't like being stranded out on the island, though.)

also, you can't really fault the summer sunsets:

from there on, it was wedding time! the dress code for the sunday matrimonials was casual, which was fortunate for all of us given how stiflingly hot it was for an outdoor wedding, although i still had my outfit checked by my mother three times:

When the outfit’s good pic.twitter.com/Crd5EHdHwd
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) August 5, 2018

we all had to take shuttle boats out to the island where the wedding was taking place (yes, another island - this part of ontario isn't called the thousand islands for nothing), but once we were there it was smooth sailing - open bar, solid catering, and fantastic weather for the entire deal. also, you have to love a laid-back wedding with an early start, quick ceremony, and plenty of time to party afterwards.

yeah, so, clearly ya girl got too drunk and sent wayyyyy too many ill-advised text messages (hahahaha errrrrrr), but managed to peace out on the first shuttle back to the mainland at like 6 pm. had to save myself and my dignity. before my buzz wore off, though, i threw on my swimsuit and hopped on a pool float that my parents have anchored outside the dock, and somehow didn't manage to drop my phone in the st. lawrence river as i took selfies:

hot mess dork.

so the whole thing was mostly just a head trip for me, because my stepbrother is the first of us siblings (on my mom/stepdad's side anyway) to get married, and he's also someone i knew when he was like, eight years old. i remember him being a little kid, you know? and now he's all out here getting hitched, and also my stepsister (his older sister) just got engaged to her long-term boyfriend as well, and these life changes don't make me feel inadequate, not at all. (gahhhhhhhhh.)

which is a good segue into the next point:

me doing online dating is still a thing?

i took a break for a couple months but now i'm back in the game, bitches.

Got a online dating message that my profile was "earnest", which seems like a nice way of saying that I have zero artifice when describing myself as a "gilded trashbag of emotions and impulse".
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) August 12, 2018

right now i'm being a dick and just window shopping, as it were - bookmarking the occasional guy i might be interested in (there's always possibilities; i'm not made of goddamn stone) and swiping through all the rest. no messages or right-swipes yet, though - like i said, window shopping. i'm not entirely sure i want to start opening any dialogues right now. (though at some point i'll likely get drunk one night and right-swipe on all my bookmarks just for the hell of it and see what happens) i mean, i definitely have some stuff i need to work through.

see, all the way back to my twenties, i've had the bad habit of going for guys that...don't really care all that much about me? or at the very least, throw me juuuuuust enough scraps of bare-minimum attention to keep me interested. (apparently there are terms for that: breadcrumbing, and to a lesser extent, benching) the problem is that i love a challenge, and trying to win over an ambivalent dude is exactly the kind of thing i'm into. i know! it sucks and i'm the worst.

but at a certain point - when you grow older, when you become a bit more jaded, when you smarten up - you realize how depressing and dumb it is to always be hanging after these "ehhhhh mayyyybe" guys, hoping they'll think you're worth it. i should be worth it. i should be looking for a guy who's super excited about getting to spend time with me. i'm legit not used to someone being excited about me, you guys. my bar for dudes is so fucking low, it's practically on the ground. but it doesn't change the fact that no matter what, there's always that one nagging truth in the back of my mind: if he's interested in you, you'll know it. if you have to speculate and guess and analyze everything, it's not it. you'll know. you shouldn't have to fucking guess.

so now it's back to the tale as old as time for many of us: trying to unlearn bad habits and realizing that i don't have to settle for less than i deserve (and maybe what i think i want has been the problem all along). and come on, i'm not some weird gargoyle - i don't think i'd be lacking dates out there. i just need to get out of this mental sinkhole.

anyway! to the logistics: i'm not sure how feasible it is for me to be dating right now finance-wise; i honestly have little to no wiggle room when it comes to extra spending between now and berlin. and sure, a lot of people will jump in here and point out that the guy will usually pay, but....i'm not like that? like, i don't expect that. so i always need to have at least some cash of my own to bring, and man oh man right now i certainly do not. we'll see how the next couple months shake out. maybe berlin will fix all my problems! ha ha ha.

it's too fucking hot outside!

i mean, it is.

that about covers it! see you here next time (sooner rather than later, i promise).

[ music | placebo, "post blue" ]

on the evening wind

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 22:47:00 +0000

hi! it's been a while, i know. it's been a busy summer, and i've got plenty to talk about for sure, but i'm back now because here's the biggest thing that's happening: i'm going to berlin. and it's happening in less than a month.

Time to go see a bit of the world.
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Aug 9, 2018 at 6:28am PDT

i'm sort of glad nobody on social media has asked why yet (other than dana, that is - hi dana!), because it's incredibly nerdy, but since this is my blog and i have zero shame, i'll put it out there right now: it's the annual rammstein fanclub meetup weekend in september. yuuuuuuup.

this one's mostly for the international fans - the german fans have a meetup every couple months - so that means there'll be plenty of english speakers, which is good for me and my stilted spoken german (i'm so nervous about trying to make friends, you guys), but the schedule of activities also looks like a goddamn blast. check it:

thursday - keyboardist flake is doing a reading from his new book
friday - beer garden meetup in the early evening, followed by a rammstein cover band show at a metal bar that's also displaying some of till's artwork
saturday - the official fanclub pre-opening of the rammstein retail store (discounts! one-off merch! props and costumes from the videos and stage shows on display!), then a tour of schloss schönhausen where the "du riechst so gut" video was filmed, then a band/berlin trivia night

sunday i head home, and thanks to the magic of time zones i'll be back in toronto at like 3 p.m. with the next day off work to recover. i'll probably be exhausted and slightly jetlagged, but i'm paying extra to fly direct just so it hopefully won't be that bad. that goes for wednesday, too; it's basically my only free day, and since i get in before noon, i'll have plenty of time to acclimatize, check in to my airbnb, and tour around the city on my own for a bit (and then sleep forever because fuck knows i won't have slept on the redeye flight over). honestly, i've wanted to go to berlin for over a year now, and i want to make the most of it when i'm not doing fanclub activities. (and by "make the most of it" i mean walk everywhere and eat so much currywurst. i'm on such a limited budget, i'll probably just survive on currywurst, doners, coffee and beer for the entire time i'm there. though, really, could be worse.)

anyway, this is a lot of firsts for me: the first time travelling to europe; first time being in germany; first time using airbnb (already booked and confirmed on alexanderplatz, right close to central!); first time going to a country that isn't english as a first language. so of course i'm a little bit nervous, especially because although i'm used to travelling solo, i don't travel a lot, and even then it's mostly to places i've been before. this is a brand new place and adventure!

like i said, though, suuuuper limited budget - i don't have a lot of money to spare otherwise, so i have to keep costs down. no touring big historical landmarks, trying not to take cabs (i'm already gonna be forking out 30 euros for the 7-day transit pass so i can take the s-bahn/u-bahn unlimited times), no big expensive dinners at fancy restaurants, et cetera. i've already laid out a budget spreadsheet and done as many calculations as i could - which includes projecting that i'm basically gonna live on rice cakes and vegetables for the next two months to make this work - and i've managed to make it doable. barely.

that said, i'm probably the most excited about visiting the rammsteinstore, and you just know i'm saving a large chunk of luggage space for the sheer amount of merch i'm gonna bring back. the announcement has promised that "you can score some great deals in the sale section. Pick up a T-shirt with a sample design on it, B items, and other special sale items!" and hot damn you know i want some sample one-offs. at this point i'm pretty sure my budgeted expenditure for rare weird merch is second only to my flight in terms of expenses.

also: i rankle at the idea of having to spend $60 to check my bag on the way back, but it may be the only way i get to own the band-branded alcohol (since it's obviously a liquid and i can't bring it in my carry-on). i mean, look at how cool the vodka is. look at it!!!

(they sell branded tequila too, but it's double the price of the vodka and i hate tequila anyway)

so along with finally getting to see berlin proper, it's important for me to just get some face time with the other fans, especially in advance of a potential tour next year. it's good to make in-person connections, and also holy shit i want to spend time with my people. here, i get looked at like i have two heads when i talk about how much i love this band; i want to be with other people who also love this band that much. and if you're going to a fanclub meetup, then yeah, it's a safe bet to say that you probably do. (i try to tell myself it's no less nerdy than attending a comic or anime convention, and there are tons of those happening all the time)

but it's a nerve-wracking thing, y'know, to show up in a different country by yourself to meet people you know tangentially from the internet and expect to be fast friends in person - especially if english isn't everyone's first language. so i'm just gonna have to put on my extrovert pants, drink a bunch of beer, and be as outgoing and fun as i can. sometimes that's a tough task for me, but it's a necessity here, unless i want to feel like the odd girl out at school again. and who knows, maybe my last year and a half of learning german will actually come through for me and give me just enough to keep up.

so: the countdown is on! just enough time for me to hyperventilate about spending 8 hours on a plane, twice.

[ music | afi, "i hope you suffer" ]

the old sorrow

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 23:29:00 +0000

it's time for a blast from the past!

I upgraded by downgrading. #ipodclassic
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jun 22, 2018 at 4:43am PDT

backstory: last year, out of nowhere my dad asked me if i wanted an ipod. apparently he had one that he barely used, and he wanted it to go to a good home (and he knew i use an ipod nonstop daily - for real, i've never gotten into listening to music on my phone, it's my ipod when i'm on the go or nothing). i shrugged, assuming that he had maybe an ipod shuffle or something, and said sure, i could always use a backup.

what i got was a full 160-gb ipod classic, one of the original and best models that sell in the range of $200+ now, and it was in near-mint condition.

smash cut to now: my own ipod - a nano i got for christmas in 2015 - has been on its last legs since last year. remember the saga of me getting the fucking thing fixed? it never fully recovered, not even after spending a month in the shop to be repaired, and not even after i had to take it back the following week because the led faceplate had started to fall off. a real shoddy job, there. anyway, it's been holding on ever since - okay fine, it's been a year, i can finally admit that my ipod originally got fucked up because i was drunk and barfed on it - but the faceplate was still unstable and one of the panels on it was threatening to fall off all the way back in december (it's been scotch taped).

so here i am with a failing ipod nano and this stellar retro ipod classic in my possession, but i hadn't yet moved anything to the classic. i wasn't sure if i should attempt to sell it; i knew i could make some good cash. but finally, i realized that 1) i was too lazy and/or paranoid about trying to sell it to a stranger to even attempt it, and 2) i kind of....didn't want to? i mean, my dad gave it to me, for me to use. at the end of the day, i felt kind of squirmy and gross about selling this thing that was a gift, even if i knew my dad probably wouldn't mind.

anyway, all this led up to last week, when i just decided i'd rather put the thing to use instead of having it sit in a box with the intentions of one day selling it (though there was a 98% chance i never would). i factory-wiped it, installed the up-to-date software, and synced up my entire current music library (which still only filled, like, 1/100th of the ipod's space). so now it's my main listening device, even if i have to once again adapt to the fact that it's a little bit heavier and more bulky than i'm used to. (also, it doesn't fit in pockets as easily, sigh)

spending of music and nostalgia and #memories, i read this retrospective on warped tour 2005 last week and it got me right in my soul. if there's one thing i love, it's thinkpieces on time periods in music scenes that i've lived through, or at least can remember happening.

i'd tried to read meet me in the bathroom: rebirth of rock and roll in new york city 2001-2011, thinking i'd find something of my past in there, but i just couldn't relate. there was too much hopping between names and assumed familiarity with key players, and you really had to know the nyc scene inside out. i mean, i just liked interpol a lot, you know?

but that had been my goal for ages: get through university while building a freelance music journalism portfolio on the side, then go down to nyc after i graduated in 2006 to try and pitch for a music journalism job. clearly that didn't work out - and lol at my naive thinking it ever would - but a part of me has always kind of 1) longed for new york and the life i thought i'd have and 2) felt nostalgic for the nyc scene i missed out on, and had to try and take part in from a distance.

i digress - this wasn't the case with the pop-punk of the early-to-mid 00's. sure, i wasn't as in it as some people, but i had the tangential edges mostly through my love of kill hannah (one of the last of the trl-popular bands), and i knew all the big players because i was just starting out as a music journalist then. it was more the feel of that scene that i remember so well, and that piece from billboard really captured that moment in time. the early-to-mid 00's were a special time for popular music, and it totally felt like something unique was happening - even if its time was limited, it certainly didn't feel like that. in the moment, it felt like things would stay that way forever.

sometimes i think i have a problem when it comes to spatial awareness of time.

i'm not good at grasping the concept that things won't stay the same forever, and somehow it always comes as an unpleasant surprise to me when things change. so it's hard for me to explain the weird, empty sadness i feel at the knowledge that a time that i look back on with so much nostalgia will never come around again. there will never again be another time when mtv and muchmusic are huge, and music videos and magazines and myspace are tastemakers, and the internet seemed less vicious and cruel. there won't be another time like then, when i was still constantly daydreaming what my future would be, and when the world seemed less stressful and chaotic.

both professionally and personally, there's never any going back. and i've always found the concept of "never again" to be hard to reconcile with.

i guess a lot of that stuff is stories for another time, though.

[ music | rammstein, "feuer und wasser" ]

facing forward

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 18:08:00 +0000

hah so apparently i am a prophet:

OH WOW for these prices perhaps not https://t.co/1oeYt0Fjad
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) June 18, 2018

remember i was just saying in my previous blog post that i had to be ready to go once rammstein announced their new tour dates? well, here it is - or rather, it looks like a special two-night holiday one-off in mexico, where they're insanely popular (and will probably be making very good bank for these shows). but because of this, the ticket prices are jacked way up, like:

eh yeah, still gonna be about $2K for me if I want to go on even the cheapest option. Come onnnnnnn, Germany tour. pic.twitter.com/4iU8WNqssO
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) June 18, 2018

and they'll sell that out, just you watch.

....i mean, i won't say it isn't doable for me, because it is, but i don't think i want to take the plunge here. it'd be super epic to see my good german dads for new year's, but i've never particularly wanted to go to mexico (especially by myself), and i would honestly rather save up my money to go see them in europe instead. i still bet they'll sell this one out, though; they're massive in mexico to the point where there's, like, fan riots. another reason for me to nope out, really. (if i had the extra $5000 to spare, clearly i would be doing the 4-night hotel package, but i don't even have the cash to cover anything beyond one, maybe two tickets right now)

also, i'm not sure i believe the above when they say both that the new album drops before the end of the year, and the two mexico shows will be the only dates they play in 2018; if the album comes out in, say, the fall, why wouldn't they do some dates around that? i mean, it could make sense if they release the album in the holiday season, but who knows. everything is speculation at this point, but you better believe the fanclub forum is going nuts. things are finally happening!! like, there'll be new promo photos and a new set list and a new stage production and uhhhhhh yeah, new rammstein songs for the first time in nine years. i'm so excited.

2019 tour set wish list: bring back "der meister", "weisses fleisch" and "adios", add "das modell", "rosenrot" and "amour" (as well as whatever bangers are on the new album). i just wanna dance and maybe cry? idk

hey look it's absolutely me:

Accurate pic.twitter.com/FE7MqAe7o4
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) June 20, 2018

but i mean, if you're here reading, you're likely used to my yelling by now. this is my yelling place.

otherwise, i feel good about how things are going in terms of life stuff - while i may not have enough money to fund a new year's trip to mexico to see one of my favourite bands play on a goddamn beach, my savings are growing and my debt is finally getting more manageable. my health is getting on track, my job's going well and i'm really thankful i have it, and i'm just having a moment where i'm grateful i've got all the stuff i've got, you know? plus i've been busy laying out plans for july and august, which include many wrestling shows (obviously), a few big concerts, some more house/cat-sitting, and not one but two(!) late-summer trips to kingston. i am that nerd with a wall calendar in her bedroom that she scribbles on to keep everything straight.

speaking of, it's a busy weekend ahead - my dad is coming to town on saturday for a quick visit (i haven't seen any of my family since uhhhhhhhhh december), then sunday a bunch of us are doing brunch and world cup-watching for sean's birthday before i have to run home and record a wrestler interview(!) with my old pals at the big gold belt podcast. i am very okay with conducting interviews that i don't have to transcribe later.

also here's my astrological chart because i feel like it'll be important at some point (basics: sun in libra, moon in scorpio, virgo ascending):

(it's not that i assume i'll end up with anybody who's astrologically compatible with me, i'm just more interested in seeing which particular traits ring true for me - you can find yours here)

bye!

[ music | florence + the machine, "big god" ]

buying your freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 16:49:00 +0000

hello from a very sunny and extraordinarily warm toronto!

(a bunch of girlfriends and i went to the rugby yesterday, because when it's hot as balls outside sometimes you need to go watch some sports and drink some cold beers together)

so montebello rockfest has come and gone this weekend, and i....was not there. like i said, even though i won the free passes, i was unable to find a way to make it happen. saddest. i just had to keep reminding myself that there's always next year, and hopefully i have a longer lead time to plan (and there's actually at least a few bands that i really want to see. but it was still a nostalgic bummer to see all the photos and stuff out of quebec this past weekend and know that i'd had tickets to go :( (also it would have been rad to just post "surprise i'm in montebello" with a photo on social media, sigh)

then again, i keep noting that my focus for next year is definitely drifting towards wacken open air:

i'm keeping my eye on the prize here: next summer i want to be standing in mud in a field in rural germany, chugging beers and throwing the devil horns. 2019 goals.

but in preparation for all this, i know that i have to go easy this year (yes, the entire year - next year's not going to be cheap), and maybe even be a boring homebody as i save my pennies. i mean, it's tough because i always see friends doing fun stuff like travelling a lot, getting tattoos all the time, having pets, paying for transit that's not public (or, err, on foot), and spending plenty of nights out - and like, i'd love to do all of that! i wish i could get out of town more often and add to my ink collection and have more nights out with my friends without worrying about money. (also, my sephora wish list is consistently a mile long.)

but here's the thing that i always keep in mind: the majority of my earnings goes towards my apartment. i rent a junior one-bedroom, and it's not cheap, but i've been in the same place since 2012 and my rent is actually...not expensive compared to the rest of toronto? (though i have seen what they charge new tenants for a similar unit, and it's significantly higher than what i pay now. mwahaha) this city is becoming infamous for high apartment rental costs, and even though mine's doable, it's still the biggest chunk of my paycheque. but it is so worth it:

i try not to torture myself by thinking how much money i could be saving if i split the unit with somebody, because the only way that would happen is if i had a boyfriend ready to move in, and 1) nobody even close to being my boyfriend right now, lol and 2) i feel like cohabitation right away is always asking for trouble. plus, i like my place. i like my space. roommates are a no go for me; i've done it and i'm not a fan.

so any time i feel sad or envious that i have to stay on budget and can't live a big lifestyle, i remind myself that i'm paying for my freedom. it's my actual #1 priority. i have a nice little apartment all to myself, and that's worth it to me. i have a great job and i get paid very well, but other than paying for my apartment, i also have to pay down the debt i accrued while freelancing and put a significant portion in my savings account for next year. so, it's a lot.

i do have a certain savings goal i want to hit by october, because for one october's my birthday (so it's a good time marker), and for two i really suspect the new rammstein album will drop this fall. (if not this fall, then i'd bet it drops next spring in time to tour the summer festival circuit.) they're done in the studio so it's likely the new album's in the can, and i seem to recall flake saying something about it maybe being released this fall, which is gonna be huge. huge! first new rammstein album in nine years! gahhhhhh

...then again, i also half-expect my good german dads will just announce the new album and a new tour with no forewarning, and i need to have some money saved up because wherever the first date of the next tour is, i'm going to be there. full stop. germany? france? spain? sure, i'm there. so, i have to be ready to go at the drop of a hat, basically.

so yeah, no animosity at all towards people who use their money for fun-time things while i skimp and save - we all choose what we want to prioritize and put our money towards, and for me, it's 1) my apartment and 2) paying off my debts and building up enough savings that i can run around europe after rammstein on tour next (this?) year. gotta keep my eye on the prize. i'll have my day in the sun soon enough.

in the meantime, here's me from yesterday. li'l narcissist.

#ootd featuring the world’s dustiest mirror
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jun 16, 2018 at 12:28pm PDT

have a good week!

[ music | rammstein, "wollt ihr das bett in flammen sehen?" ]

break the silence

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 23:52:00 +0000

okay i'm going to get this one off quick, because it's worth writing about: i saw depeche mode here in toronto on monday night - my third time seeing them live - and it was an experience, as always.

i don't gush about them as much as some other bands (...*coughs in german*), but as i said in an earlier blog post, depeche mode are one of my favourite bands of all time. as i said to a friend after i bought a ticket to this show (kind of last minute, because i'm a brokeass, but i knew it was something i shouldn't miss), "their music has been there with me through so many phases of my life", and that's the truth.

i fell in love with them pretty late, for me - probably when i was about 22-23 - but they've been with me ever since. not always as, like, my absolute #1 favourite band of all time!!!, but they've always been there, you know? their music has always been in the background in my life, so whenever they're nearby for a concert - because they're still touring, even though the band's in its 38th(!) year of existence now - i try to make it out.

a depeche mode show is part concert and part communion (with a bit of a dance party thrown in). this time around, they played all the hits i'd hoped for - "enjoy the silence", "personal jesus", "never let me down again", "a question of time", "a pain that i'm used to", "walking in my shoes"(!), "in your room"(!!), and more (although no "master and servant" or "policy of truth", and i think i've only heard them play "just can't get enough" like once?). they covered some of their newer stuff, sure, but the crowd - one which actually made me feel young (quoth my stepfather: "that's why i don't go to concerts. too many old people my age there.") - was obviously there to sing and dance along with the classic singles.

"never let me down again", in particular, has always been one of my favourites to see live; i've said it before, but it's my favourite song of any band, ever. if anyone ever asks me "what's your favourite song?" i have a ready answer, and it's that song. not rammstein, not moist, not kill hannah. it's "never let me down again", full stop. and live, oh fuck, it's something else. i took a video of the mass hand-waving right before the final chorus, but it's nowhere near as good as this:

what really got me right in the feels, though - and as expected - was this:

Last one from last night, I swear - because “Stripped” ended up meaning more to teenage me than any other song, and this synth line is enough to punch me right in the fucking heart.
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jun 12, 2018 at 5:45am PDT

how do you even explain what a song means to you, anyway? it's a tough task to try and find the right words to describe how it makes you feel, and what this collection of sounds represents to you personally. i was a music writer for years, and i still struggle with it.

here, i'll try, and clearly it deviates back to familiar territory for me: their cover of "stripped" was the first rammstein song i loved, really loved, and it stuck with me through so many of my formative late teenage years. (it was the song that got me into depeche mode in the first place, to be honest.) it was probably my most-listened to song in my freshman year of university, when i was living on my own in toronto(!) for the very first time. putting "stripped" on repeat while getting ready to go out to the bars and clubs was my ritual. it made me feel cool and invincible and badass, even though in my heart i was still this awkward farm girl who somehow made it to the big city.

so now, whenever i hear that synth line - whether it's in rammstein's version or the depeche mode original - it's the most evocative sound of my shifting state of mind and personal growth in my late teens and early twenties. i mentioned that when i saw rammstein last year, "stripped" was probably my biggest surprise in the set list, and i'm not lying when i said i nearly burst into tears. it was straight-up catharsis, getting to see the song that soundtracked some of my most turbulent years played live in front of me. i didn't expect that. i never thought it was going to happen. (when jenna and i saw rammstein: paris in the theatre last march, i turned to her and said in a hushed voice, "holy shit, what if they play stripped??" they didn't, not on the 2012 tour, but i actually didn't expect to ever see it live)

and then, there it was (see above). and then, less than a week from a year to the date, i got to see the originals - depeche mode - play "stripped" live too, and it just got me right in the heart all over again. it's everything: the synth, the darkness, the deep intoning and harmonies on "let me hear you make decisions / without your television", and how it just resonates, you know? those kind of songs are the ones that take you back to the past but also keep you anchored to the present. it's an experience, and one that's wholly unique to anybody who loves music. one foot in the past, the other in the moment.

there are so few songs like that, for me; the only other song that's come close in recent years is "amour". last fall, i was going through some stuff - that's how i'll put it, anyway - and i spent a lot of time standing on the far side of my office's building, smoking cigarettes and listening to that song on repeat. even now, just hearing the guitar line takes me back to the colder weather and the smell of smoke, wondering if i was doing the right thing. if i'm still doing the right thing.

but still - no matter what band, no matter what song. one foot in front of the other.

[ music | depeche mode, "enjoy the silence" ]

signs everywhere i look

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 14:32:00 +0000

and now it is june!

aaaaaaaaaaand i blew it:

uhhhhhh anybody want to drive to Quebec this weekend
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on Jun 10, 2018 at 7:01am PDT

see, i entered rockfest's obviously-named "last chance contest" on a whim last week, figuring that there's no way i would win because i never win anything. but lo and behold, i got the above email in my inbox yesterday morning, and clearly the wheels in my brain began turning, because it's me and because there's nothing i love more than a spontaneous adventure to go see some live music.

sadly, i think it's a pass for me. for one, i only won a pair of wristbands, which means i'd still have to fork over for last year's route of bus to ottawa, hostel reservations for 2-3 nights, shuttle bus to montebello, and beer. for two, uh, it starts this week. like, this thursday is the first day of the festival in montebello. it's not difficult for me to peace out of work two days early this week, but i would still feel like a dick about giving such short notice. (likewise, it's not like i don't have the money to do this, i just don't know if it'd actually be worth it. the rockfest experience is definitely worth it, but this year's lineup kind of isn't? sad but true)

emma suggested that if i wanted company, she and i could maybe just do saturday (she's locked in to work on friday), but the logistics of getting to and from montebello for a single day are both daunting and still costly. anyway, the story might be different if 1) i had another week's notice and 2) there were any bands in the lineup that i'd kill to see, but not this year. i'd much rather save my pennies for next year's festival mayhem (wacken open air is clearly a goal.)

also, on the topic of tickets: i'm not sure if i mentioned it previously, but i did have a ticket scored for the massive (and sold out) all in wrestling show in chicago on september 1st - yet a couple days ago i decided to try and sell it. combination of a lot of factors, among them: it'd be a big chicago trip and i don't think i really have the cash (i have to keep saving for europe next year); i could make some good coin by selling it; i'm not all that excited by the match card; and it turns out it's my mother and stepfather's joint retirement party in kingston the day beforehand. that last point was kind of the deciding factor for me, because you only retire once, and i probably should be a dutiful daughter and be there for it.

plus, i do have a certain goal for savings that i'm striving to hit this year, because i'm always keeping an eye on europe next year and it won't be a cheap trip. and right now, to say that i'm tracking behind on that goal is uhhhhhhhh an understatement? so it'll be good to know that i'm getting a tiny boost in september with the proceeds from selling my ticket (it went for triple what i paid for it). also, this is the truth:

I mean, I love America. I love it. I'll probably go back at some point! Just, definitely don't feel like it right now.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) June 11, 2018

sorry, america.

don't get me wrong, though - i feel sad to willingly miss out on any adventures, although i still do have many locked in. i hate to keep coming back to it, but this time last year i felt like i was on top of the goddamn world. i was 100% focused on rockfest coming up, i had so many amazing wrestling shows on the near horizon, and i didn't care at all about anything except for listening to as much rammstein as i could, learning german every spare second, and taking care of myself without worrying about what anyone else thought. it was incredibly freeing, is what i'm trying to say, and i sort of miss having that singular focus on just me and my life.

in the wake of my whole dating app adventure - which, by the way, i'm ending tomorrow, as my one-month paid subscription will either need to be continued or discontinued and i just don't care to keep going with it right now - i went back to my myers-briggs test results, and the thing about my intj personality that really hit true for me was this part:

The positive side of INTJs’ “giving up” is that they are most attractive when they aren’t trying to be attractive, working in a familiar environment where their confidence and intelligence can be seen in action. Allowing others to come to them is often INTJs’ best strategy, and if they perceive a potential to the relationship, they will spare no effort in developing and maintaining stability and long-term satisfaction.

and ooooh yeah, that's it right there. i know from lived-in experience that i attract more people when i'm not trying at all - when i'm not even thinking about it - but if i make the active effort, it never works. it really doesn't.

so with that in mind, i'm gonna peace out a bit on trying and just focus on myself instead. but this whole social experiment with online dating wasn't for a loss! a very important thing i learned - other than that i don't owe anyone anything - is that i don't have to do something if i don't want to. i don't have to reply to this person. i don't have to go on a date with this person. i don't have to do anything if i don't want to. if i want to just be the loner weirdo who stays single and watches rammstein dvds and goes to bed early, i can absolutely do that, and there's nothing wrong with it. it's my life, and i'm the only one who calls the shots.

as for the rest, i know that i do need to get stuff back on track. i need to take better care of myself, cut back on the drinking, get more sunshine and exercise, watch out for my finances, take on new work projects, and focus on just being happy and grateful for what i've got (ie. friends, family, job, apartment, health). it's a tall order to do all of that at once rather than in bits and pieces, but it's good, self-fulfilling motivation to get as much of it done as i can.

to sum up: i have a lot of shit that i still need to sort out, and i'm acutely aware that i have to do it by myself. time to get to work this summer.

talk to you later!

p.s. lastly, for posterity, because i like these tweets:

This version is better, there's a surprise flamethrower https://t.co/haNNxMN7I6
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 17, 2018

"rammstein: there's a surprise flamethrower" should be their motto.

[ music | emigrate, "rainbow" ]

butterflies and hurricanes

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 29 May 2018 13:49:00 +0000

me, last week: "man, i've been doing such a good job saving up and not spending money. i should be proud! i am the budgeting queen!"
me, over the course of last weekend's drinking: lol

in sum total, things i ended up buying:

- ticket to see depeche mode
- the last rammstein dvd i was missing
- a sephora order
- one-month subscription to memrise

they're all tangentially related, so let's go through them!

so i've been looking to load up june and july with big plans and good times, which means i couldn't let the return of our original synth-goth dads pass me by:

The date was coming up sooner than I thought! (@ghouldaddy, you going to this one?)
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on May 26, 2018 at 1:02pm PDT

this will be my third time seeing them live; i missed them last time they were in toronto and ended regretting it immensely, so i didn't want to miss out on this one. depeche mode is one of my favourite bands of all time - their music has been there for me during some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life - and i want to see them as many times as possible before they finally hang it up for good.

so this is in my concert schedule along with the rise against / afi / anti-flag show in july, which promises to be an awesome time as well. i had such a blast seeing afi at rockfest last summer, and i'm way excited to see them again (without having to go all the way to quebec). gimme all that sweaty outdoor punk rock!

speaking of, a ton of rockfest news is popping up in my feed, due to the fact that it's less than a month away, and even though i'm not going i'm still nostalgically wistful/envious for those attending. the lineup this year just didn't look as impressive to me (plus it's three days now, and as i said last year, two days was more than enough for me), but still, the experience itself was/is a blast. hopefully next year! (though as with everything, it's totally dependent on whether or not rammstein does their next tour in 2019)

good segue to my next idiot purchase: the rammstein - videos 1995-2012 blu-ray, aka the final dvd i was missing in my collection. once it arrives, i'll own all six of their official dvd releases, which means i am obsessed, but like i needed this purchase to tell me that, come on now. i'd left this dvd til the last because it doesn't offer a lot i haven't seen already - all the videos and their making-ofs are available on youtube (plus their previous video compilation dvd, 2001's rammstein - lichtspielhaus, also included a bunch of live footage and extras, which made it more than worth tracking down), which means i mostly bought it for the novelty of getting to watch their videos on my giant-ass tv rather than my laptop.

there's one exception, though - it has the video and making-of for "pussy", which isn't available on youtube because the video is actual porn. it's also the reason that the dvd is rated 18+ and marked as "explicit content":

hellllllllllll yeah, give me those high impact sex scenes & nudity.

(similarly, the sephora order i put in last weekend included a red eyeliner, because the goal is forever to emulate the giant swathes of red that paul had smeared across his eyes on the 2016 tour. he is my favourite, forever. that's also his creepy hairless head on the dvd cover, and you're damn right i shopped around until i found the paul variation. #teampaul)

this loops us around to my final purchase, one month of pro access to memrise, a language learning app that i've been hooked on since march. sure, i've hit over a year with duolingo, but memrise has different learning options, and even more bonus features with a pro subscription. so after using the freemium app for a few months, i'm trying out the full version for one month then seeing if it's worth shelling out for longer. i made the mistake last year of buying 3 months of rosetta stone only to discover that it barely did anything to up my comprehension, so it's time for a trial.

honestly, though, i can't understate how much learning german has done for me. not only is my spoken accent coming along (and i never managed it back when i was learning in school), but the language is becoming instinctive to me in a way where stuff like the incorrect masculine/feminine/neutral or a bad sentence structure looks "wrong" to my brain. that's what comes from over a year of 1) consistently using language apps and 2) listening to bands sing in german every day. it starts to sink in and it blows my mind constantly.

that's a quirk about me: i have to pick up a language intuitively. the minute i start trying to mentally pick it apart and figure out how it works, i'm utterly lost. and this includes english! this is my native tongue, but i'll be damned if i can explain how it works. i just know that it does. (this is also the reason i never became an english teacher. i honestly can't explain the ins and outs of the language.)

also, having a new language toy to play around with gives me something to do while i'm looking after the fancy beast til tomorrow:

lastly, thing i did not buy, but wanted to: this hat.

I'm blaming @JoeYerdon for how badly I need this hat now pic.twitter.com/XM949g3gKd
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 24, 2018

soon.

happy tuesday!

[ music | rammstein, "halleluja" ]

even the stars are ill at ease

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Sun, 27 May 2018 13:51:00 +0000

hi friends! welcome to the almost-end of may, aka the time of year when my facial complexion goes from "good" to "might be a meth addict". blech. (the combination of heat, sweat and monthly hormone cycles is going to be the end of me, every year.)

at least the city looks nice while i'm walking around feeling like some kind of golem:

trinity bellwoods, you have my summertime heart. well, me and every other goddamn hipster within city limits, anyway.

so in advance of a wacky week coming up - i have things to do after work every single day; i brought this on myself, truly (plus i'm housesitting/catsitting again from tomorrow through to wednesday) - i've been determined to have a solid weekend on my own, even if it's not a long weekend like our neighbours to the south. so far i've run errands, i've relaxed on my balcony, i've worked through the current book i'm reading, i've done a shit ton of german lessons, i've painted my nails, i've hit the gym, i've watched some rammstein concerts, i've gone for some long walks, and i'm off a bit later to get groceries and put in my advance vote in the ontario election. legit the chillest weekend. (yeah, for me the definition of "chill" is "to be busy and productive in as self-fulfilling a manner as possible")

but hey, i've been burying the lede, haven't i? okay, so here's the part you've all clicked for: me, dating. woooooo! argh.

a current selfie from my dating profile. the giant sunglasses come with the girl.

i mentioned it on twitter, but i'm not going to blog or tweet publicly about my dating adventures, for two reasons: one, i believe that some things should still be kept private (or between me and my friends); two, i'd be absolutely fucking mortified if the situation was reversed. like, if i went on a date with a dude and later found that he'd tweeted or blogged about it - favourably or not - i'd be freaked out. so, not doing that, sorry.

however! i can definitely talk about me and how i feel about the process.

i'm envious of people who talk about dating like it's no big deal. i have girlfriends who actively go out on multiple dates with multiple guys every week, and i wish i could be casual about it. i don't have the capacity or capability to just date around and have fun and not get attached and not take it so seriously. i just don't want to give myself away too freely or too easily. it has to be somebody i think is worth it.

also, it helps that i don't need somebody else in my life. (i've said it before but i'll keep reiterating it until people believe me.) for me, it's completely circumstantial. if i like somebody, cool; if i don't, i don't, and that's fine too. i've always said that for me, a relationship and/or dating situation is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

but for now, i'm sticking with trying it out anyway - just to see what's out there - because everything else aside i'm finding it to be a good social exercise for me on a lot of fronts. you know how sometimes you really don't want to do something but you kind of need to, so then you do it, and you have to sit with it and learn how to be comfortable with it even through the flight response? that's me right now, learning to be comfortable with dating.

plus the thing is - and i swear i won't try to make this sound too pathetic - i wasn't super desirable when i was a teenager, which led my dumb brain to warp itself into thinking that "i should be thankful and grateful for any attention i get!" which meant that for years and years, i would be paralyzed when it came to turning guys down. even the thought of having to reject potential affection brought on serious anxiety for me (and still does, if i'm being honest). but this? this is good for me, because it shows that for one, there's plenty of potential guys out there, and for two, i can say no if i'm not into it. (i mean, i do try to keep my humanity and remember that there's someone else on the other side of the screen. although i have definitely unmatched with guys if i'm not into the conversation or if it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere.)

i mean, i've been using an online dating app for just about two weeks and i'm closing in on 2,000 likes. that's actually...a bit insane to me. sure, most guys just swipe left on pretty much any girl - cast that wide net, boys - but people aren't wrong when they say that dating apps are an ego boost. so, sure. however, it doesn't mean that i have to like anybody. (and i rarely do. i'm just window-shopping, i guess. i kind of feel like when i come across somebody that clicks for me, i'll know it.)

but that's going to be how things go for a while. i'm not sure what's going to happen with any of this, but i'm trying to just enjoy the ride (and maybe even have fun while i'm at it? gasp, shock). and like i said to my mother the other day, "i really think something's going to happen - like, maybe not right away, but i feel like something will happen soon." yeah, we'll see. june's almost here, after all.

in the meantime: solo life, it is good.

sup pic.twitter.com/cTtIWDC7za
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 26, 2018

have the best sunday!

[ music | rammstein, "haifisch" ]

kiss with a fist

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 15 May 2018 13:17:00 +0000

it is time!! for the wrestling!!

or rather, it was - last friday, to be exact. it was time once again for the annual toronto show of ring of honor's war of the worlds tour, and i'd been sitting on a ticket for the event since, uhhhh, january? roh is my favourite wrestling promotion and employs some of my favourite wrestlers in the world, so attending their show here is the highest priority for me.

this year, i even took the day off work so i could get to the east end early (for the last few years, the show's been held at ted reeve area, way out in the reaches of east york) and meet my friends for food and beers beforehand. also, since the doors are at 6 p.m. to allow for an hour and a half of meet & greets and merch-selling, the lineup generally starts around 3:30-4, so we aimed to meet up and start predrinking at 2:30. even with me suffering through a brutal hangover from thursday night, ugh.

so: the week had been a rollercoaster of emotions for ya girl, beginning with the fact that it didn't look like my fave (and roh world champ) dalton castle would be wrestling (gahhhhh), then to the knowledge that he would be wrestling in the main event (yesssss), then to the announcement that he was actually injured and wouldn't be competing after all (booooooooooooo). so, a disappointment for sure, but the injury bug can't be helped.

however. however! i was bet a beer to go talk to sanada, the handsomest wrestler/man in the entire world (and probably my favourite wrestler in new japan), so i threw down my $30 and went to go babble some of my rusty, broken japanese at one-half of the iwgp tag team champions.

Pictured: handsomest man and 1/2 of very nervous fangirl pic.twitter.com/NNNnxtqdjS
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 11, 2018

(that's me just out of shot, trying not to die) sanada may be a intimidating hypebeast of a man, but he's also very ready with the smiles when faced with a giggly fangirl, especially one who can barely eke out "you are so cool" in japanese (he asked me in english if i'd been to japan! aww). so i got a signed 8x10 photo (i'd bought a sanada t-shirt earlier in the evening but i planned on wearing it so i didn't want it autographed), then asked if i could get a picture of him - "just me?" he asked, and i nodded, because there was no way i would sully these magnificent photos with my dumb face:

the handsomest. i gasped out good-luck wishes for his match later then ran for the hills, shrieking internally. sanada the best.

also, i did this:

I just ran up to Hangman Page, told him he was super hot, then ran away. TODAY IS MY DAY.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 11, 2018

look, i was more alcohol than i was dignity at this point, okay? (but sean, who'd been watching nearby, noted to me that page nodded with an "all riiiiight" look on his face as i dashed away, which was a highlight)

alright, here's the best shots i managed to take on the night, you can scroll through on each in instagram:

Best of the first half. #ROHToronto #ROHWOTW
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on May 11, 2018 at 5:35pm PDT

Best of the second half. #ROHToronto #ROHWOTW
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on May 11, 2018 at 7:23pm PDT

much bonus love especially to roppongi 3k - sho (the one in gold) caught my eye from the top turnbuckle and winked at me so obviously that my friends started yelling and slapping my shoulders. "he just winked at caitlin!!" hahahaha ahhhhh i will take that rather needed ego boost, ありがとうございました.

even though i hadn't initially been so excited for the card (especially compared to last year's greatness), obviously i got so into it once the show started. toronto crowds for roh shows are always loud and hyped as hell, and according to those watching on the stream it definitely translated to the broadcast as well (the good thing is that these aren't treated as non-canon house shows - they all feed into the larger storyline). there's a reason i refer to roh's annual war of the worlds toronto stop as my wrestling christmas: because it's always the most fun gathering of all my wrestling friends and all the best fans in toronto and the surrounding area. add in the fact that it's some of the best wrestling on the planet (that's not wwe) and it's the recipe for a memorable night every year.

and for real, the matches were excellent. got to see a really phenomenal young bucks match (which won over one of my companions, who was only there because her boyfriend is a huge fan), the entirety of los ingobernables de japon, jay white defending the iwgp u.s. title, some really cool angles for tv storylines, and a lot more. the crowd was hot all night, i got to meet up with like a dozen friends, and the vibe was electric. it's incredibly nerdy how much i love roh, but it really does remind me why i love wrestling in general.

so it was a much-needed night of graps and pals and good times, and completely appreciated on all fronts. a bunch of us have already been plotting to catch a buffalo show, if they run another one in the fall like they did last october, so hopefully that ends up on the horizon.

(also dalton castle himself liked one of my tweets this morning, which is more than enough reason to have me grinning like a dope all day.)

happy tuesday!

[ music | florence + the machine, "hunger" ]

too much is never enough

noreply@blogger.com (Caitlin H.) — Tue, 08 May 2018 13:19:00 +0000

holy shit, i actually did it:

Es war ein Jahr. 🇩🇪 @duolingo
A post shared by Caitlin H. (@mylovesubliminal) on May 8, 2018 at 5:43am PDT

when i wrote this blog post on may 11th last year, i'd already been using duolingo for a few days, but now here we are, a year later. i think i only missed maybe 4-5 days in there - i know i missed two days because i was at rockfest, and i think there were a couple more days where either i was busy or just forgot - but yeah, a solid year of pushing myself to practice german every day.

it started off, obviously, because i got back into rammstein so hard and it drove me nuts not being able to understand the lyrics. (little did i know that it's, uh, probably better that way.) then i just thought well, what the hell, i at least have some background in german since i took it in university, so why not make it a mission to see how far i can go with independent learning? after all, there are free language apps now, which were never a resource i had back in the day (either when i was in school or when i was teaching myself japanese as a teenager).

here's a truth: when you're single, you can sometimes have a lot of free time on your hands, so it's a plus if you can find something to do to fill those hours. (i mean, even if you're in a relationship, you should still be able to have free time to pursue things you enjoy!) and since i was only a few months out of a relationship at the time, i found myself with hours on my own that needed to be filled.

ooooooof, and how pic.twitter.com/GJvwJYnUxq
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) April 22, 2018

the other thing that was important to me - and still is, really - was that it was something of value for me. i didn't want to spend all my sudden free time and energy binging on netflix - i wanted to do something for me, something that i could be proud of myself for. and even a year later, i still feel that way when i take time in the mornings and evenings to work away at my german lessons - that i'm doing something to be proud of and not to impress anybody else.

so where am i at now? i'm up to using two different apps (duolingo, which i've completed, and memrise, where i'm up to german level 6) as well as a grammar book to study, and i can construct simple-to-intermediate sentences. i've got a good mental sense of the placement of words, and my accent is coming along well. but the most exciting for me is that i'm at the point where i can look over a full paragraph in german and although i might not know every single word, i can actually get the gist of what it's saying! holy shit. (also, unfortunately there will be many a time that i actually pick up on what a rammstein lyric means, and then i openly cringe at how hard i'm going to hell.)

anyway, keeping up with learning a new language for a whole year is actually a huge success for me, since i tend to drop hobbies fairly quickly. the thing with me is, i'm not....the most motivated individual? and one thing that i really, physically cannot do is have weekly obligations that i need to hold myself to; ie. having a class every thursday night or something. if i have a "fixed thing" on my weekly schedule, i just end up feeling squirrelly and constrained and much more likely to skip out.

i used to push through it more when i was younger - i'd have spin classes twice a week; i registered for an 8-week japanese class - but now i've gotten to the point in my adult life where i try not to do things i don't want to do. this is...probably bad? i mean, there's something to be said for discipline, faking it til you make it, and so on. sometimes you should do the things you don't want to do.

but i'm an adult! and an inherently lazy one. which is why learning languages through apps is perfect for me. low commitment! (i'm bad at commitment unless it's something i really, really want.)

LITERAL TRANSLATION pic.twitter.com/8DKM7q6hZJ
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) May 5, 2018

it's also fun that, as i mentioned on twitter a bunch of times last week (it was a slow day), i'm now officially past the one-year mark for my nipple piercings! which means i can probably take the studs out if i wanted, but even the thought of that makes me a bit queasy, so no. (pulling barbells posts out through my flesh? nooooooooope.) but it's amusing to remember how last year i basically decided over the course of a weekend that yes, i want to get pierced, it's going to happen like tomorrow, and then i went through with it and had to go do a jager shot like immediately.

it was then a very strange month of aftercare:

My 30s are exactly as envisioned: spending evenings drinking wine solo in my bathroom while holding shot glasses of saltwater over my tits.
— Caitlin H. (@criseyde) June 1, 2017

(i would also watch rammstein videos while doing so, because obviously i would.) like i said on twitter, 2017 was a goddamn ride, especially the springtime. i think i ought to be harnessing some of that madcap energy this spring as well.

now, to the mailbag!

thank you johnny in california! trust me, you are far from the weirdest lurker, i'm sure. i'm always a little glad that people both here and on twitter don't mind all the wrestling talk; i do try to intersperse it with more general interests and fun things for everyone. gotta know your audience.

well anon, bukowski said it best, for me:

and that's kind of it, really.

coooooooool cool cool.

and i'm off!

[ music | emigrate, "born on my own" ]