Tyrion

Hey Gwai, Tanuchan. I'm only back in Official Weenie -I don't have that title for nothing- fashion though. I'll try to pop in and look around a bit more often than was the case in recent years, but I predict that I will fade back out of sight eventually.

Okay... so I'm coming back from months (Years? Who knows...) of inactivity and reviving a slumbering thread, but there's a reason for it. I swear! In an effort to do something other than read my assigned books, I decided to visit the Pen to see how things were going, and being more of a Cabaret Room type of guy, I figured I'd stick to this place in my endeavour to catch up on what was happening. I scrolled down the page looking for names I knew, and upon seeing Katzaniel's, figured this thread was worth reading, not because she used to wear the "Eater of Non-members" badge that had me scared, or because she was the object of the best (and only!) love letter I've ever written, but because I remembered telling her long ago that I would write something for one of her projects, and failed to do so. So congratulations Katz for obtaining such an opportunity, and sorry for neglecting to finish my story for your project. I doubt I will ever try to participate in one of those again, but should the situation arise, please remember that I suck at meeting deadlines.

Hah, I love "Elevator Blues." I love the humor in it. That and I love stairs. Sometimes I run up the 9 floors of the building during the class breaks. Seeing all those stories makes me feel like I need to stop thinking about writing and actually producing something. Quick note to the others who posted feedback. Titles are underlined when they head the text, but short stories, poems and articles are referred to by using quotation marks.

Well of course you trust me! It says so right there in the text! And thanks, I wasn't too confident about it at first. It's almost halfway between a long joke and an essay. I was aiming for the latter, but I couldn't pass up all the humor that came to mind. I'm slowly warming up to the mix as I read it over and over though.

I don't really know how to describe this, but once you've read it you'll get it. "Pointless Rambling" I can't pick a career that focuses on a single thing. One day, I want to experience a new environment, to work on matters that take me to inexistent places and times, the next I want to explore the world I know in greater detail. Those needs are highly irregular, and no real job can satisfy them. Thankfully, being a writer is no real job. I write for no one in particular. I write according to what I feel, and no one can tell me how I'm going to feel next. I can't control that myself, so you couldn't even say that I'm my own boss. The health benefits suck, too. Why did I have to be a writer? The thought of it all proves very unsettling. How am I supposed to live with this? If I do manage to get an income from writing, who's to say that I can keep doing it afterwards? It's a known fact that I can't stick to a work schedule. Unless a sudden inspiration tells me that writing is what I want to be doing, I'm most likely to just think about writing. For one very simple reason, writing dominates all other forms of activity or thought. No matter what your own odd little brain thinks can become a sentence. No matter what you're doing after lunch can end up as a tale. In most cases though, that thought and that tale will bore the vast majority of readers. The most probable exception would be yourself, and you'd need to be the egocentric type. I belong to that group, by the way – trust me. If there's anyone you can trust it's certainly me. Nobody could ever become as trustworthy as I am, even if they made it their life's goal. Now that you trust me, and that we've established that I'm egocentric, it'll interest you to know that my own actions and thoughts fail to interest me. Not quite all of them, but certainly a huge chunk. So what does that say about my writing? Nothing. Why should it? I don't write about everything I believe in. I don't even believe in everything I write – I hope that doesn't affect your trust too much. My job as a writer is not to tell you what I think; it's to put you in a situation I imagine, so that you can tell me what you think. That's why you should always refer to the text as the subject when you're analyzing a piece. If you speak for the text, you can never be wrong. If you venture a guess that this text tries to establish a link between imagination and realization, nobody can prove you wrong. If you say that the author writes this because he feels the need to justify his life's choice, then you are wrong, and I can prove it just by saying so – seeing as you trust me, and that I'm the author. The explanation is simple really: once complete, the work has a life of its own, and not even the writer can tell you that you view it erroneously, much less define his own creation. It's very easy to call a writer crazy after reading his work. When text comes out of one's head, it'll only ever be a semi-coherent assembling of ideas. When you read it, you follow the ideas as best you can. The truth behind the ideas, however, will remain unattainable. Sure, you can think you get the content, but more always lurks behind an unseen metaphor. You need to be crazy to assume the responsibility for everything you're sending out there, and you need to be crazy to claim to be teaching people you will never know about a concept you will never fully grasp. Yet with all of that, I find myself in an amazing position. With everything I write, I add to the potential that you will read it, find a reason for its existence that I never conceived of, and credit me with it. That could explain why some authors never discuss their publications; that way we can never be sure if they were aware of the ideas they may suggest, and we must assume that they were. I'm above using cheap tricks like that one, though, so I'll tell you the deal right away. I purposely – and with full awareness, I can't stress this enough – put in any brilliant thought you might extract from these last few paragraphs. Trust me.

I don't like hyped up holidays in general, so it's no surprise that I don't like Valentine's day. I'm the kind of person who doesn't notice it's December 25th, but I almost always know when it's November 11th (don't ask me why). The reason I don't like Valentine's day is that it tries to make "love" seems warm, happy and fuzzy. Real love is about something much greater than that. It's about pain and humility. The warm, happy, fuzzy stuff is the hook that makes you endure the other stuff. There's no pain like the one that love brings you. It's the most productive feeling there is. Love without conflict is only half the experience. Love works in extremes. You can live all your life perfectly contented without ever experiencing any of it. You get into it for the 'happy' things, but the rest is what makes you grow. If you never have any pain or conflicts, then love is just a boring, mundane feeling to you. No great story was ever written about a perfect relationship. Pain helps you define yourself. How you handle it shows your character. How you face it shows your courage. No matter who you are, it will teach you humility. Valentine's day should be about pain.

I doubt it, really. And I actually like the 4-party formula. I don't like majority governments. It makes things easier for parties, and that shouldn't happen, especially since representatives are very strongly discouraged from voting against their parties. Majority parties would allow too many things to happen. You'd have good and awful years in the country depending on who's in power and what your point of view is. Imagine a conservative majority government. They'd surely make gay marriage illegal again. Since I think every other party opposes them on that issue, the moment they lose the majority gay marriage will be legal again. What's the point of making decisions if they're just going to be reversed again all the time? With minority governments, changes are harder to make, but those changes will stay.

And with a voting rate of 55%, you have a good chance that the person you took it from won't be missing their card. "They didn't send me one, but I wasn't gonna vote anyway." It's like they're asking for vote tampering, it wouldn't cost anything to ask for a piece of ID when handing in the card. Here they have two people behind a desk, one to cross out your name, the other to hand you your ballot, I'm sure one of them has time to verify your name. That's how they do it in municipal elections over here.

Yes, I went a couple of hours ago, right before my first post in this thread. It's a shame my dad can't vote, his boss has issues so he couldn't come from Boston this weekend. The voting system is ridiculous though, all I'd have to do is dress differently, shave my goatee and I could vote in his place, since I have his voting card and they don't ask for ID. I would never do that, but they could take 2 seconds to verify ID before letting you vote. They had a thing on TV a couple years ago where they sent a woman to vote 6 times in one election just to show how dumb it was.

*opens the can slightly* People have a tendency to misinterpret the Bloc Quebecois as a seperatist party, but that isn't true. It's a federal party, it *can't* be seperatist. Since it can't be a majority party (it managed to be the official opposition once, because of split votes in the rest of Canada), its purpose is not to run the country the way Quebec wants it run, but to simply defend issues that are important to us (as a French-speaking society). Of course sometimes our interests coincide with that of other nation-wide parties, but not always. As Gilles Duceppe said in an interview, they are not aiming to go against a party in particular, they view each idea for what it is, sometimes that means agreeing with Liberals, other times with Conservatives etc. I agree that it's pretty weird for you guys to get debates with Gille Duceppe when you couldn't even vote for his party. Proportional representation would change that though, not that I would expect many non-Quebecers to vote for them. But yeah, B.Q. shouldn't be seen as a seperatist group, they're more of an alternative to seperation.

Proportional representation would certainly help your Green Party, Canid. I'm actually all for it, and most people I know are... They should really make that happen in the near future. Have you heard the voting rate argument? In countries with proportional representation (the example of Australia was mentionned), the voting rate is close to 95%, as opposed to our system, which has one around 55%. I go vote even though my vote changes nothing, I would love for it to make a difference. I'd never be one to vote for Liberals, but what's with people turning to the Conservatives out of spite? As far as I'm concerned, they're even worse. Sure, it'll show the Liberals that they can't be careless anymore, but Conservatives... I guess I can live with them having a minority government, because they'd be opposed by everyone else on issues like gay marriage, but a majority government would certainly set us back. And how about these lyrics, they're much better than the English ones (comes with my own translation). Ô Canada! Terre de nos aïeux, (O Canada, land of our ancestors,) Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux! (Your (fore)head is crowned by glorious florets.) Car ton bras sait porter l'épée, (Because your arm can carry the sword,) Il sait porter la croix; (He can carry the cross;) Ton histoire est une épopée (Your history is an epic poem) Des plus brillants exploits. (Of the most brilliant feats.) Et ta valeur de foi trempée (And your valor of forged faith) Protégera nos foyers et nos droits; (Will protect our homes and our rights.) Protégera nos foyers et nos droits. Okay... so a few parts of this one need revising also... but it's already much better in regards to poetic devices, wouldn't you say? I'll still try to rewrite the English one...

Zany Zairian zoos zap zircons.

Everyone knows I want to be a writer. When I complain about being bored, my mom tells me to work on my book.

Television totally tells true tales!

Koalas kill Kuwaiti kids kindly. (I don't know what the Kuwaiti kids did to deserve this, however.)